Opinion

America watched three searing versions of reality television this week. They all demonstrated that under the glare of the lights and the stress of questioning, character reveals itself. Christine Blasey Ford was a startlingly powerful witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in part because she had been unknown to most Americans before the cameras started rolling. Her answers were clear ...

The world’s biggest repository of citizen information, India’s Aadhaar database, is now beyond the private sector’s reach. That was the verdict last week by the country’s top court, which refused to strike down the entire biometric-based system as unconstitutional. Now only the government can use it, and that’s a problem. Fulfilling regulatory “know-your-customer,” or KYC, requirements by verifying a bunch ...

Brexit-backing Boris Johnson wants to slash taxes on property purchases in Britain. A rival thinks they should be raised to target foreign buyers – not Jeremy Corbyn, but Prime Minister Theresa May. Neither pitch is convincing. Johnson is wrong to think that cutting stamp duty will fix a housing market that years of cheap mortgages and subsidies have distorted to ...

It can be hard to get your head around just how much energy the world uses. Expressed in terms of oil, it was equivalent to almost 14 billion metric tons of the stuff in 2017. That’s like burning through all of Russia’s proved reserves in the space of 12 months, which is, in technical terms, a lot. But there’s an ...

For the group of people meant to be enemies of President Donald Trump’s trade agenda, the revised North American trade deal looks pretty good. Despite the new name (the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) dropping any references to trade, let alone freedom, the tariff rates on imports from Canada and Mexico are still a mass of zeroes. The main new element ...

Just as the Federal Reserve steadily picks up the pace of rate increases, Wall Street’s quantitative strategists are telling clients to sell US stocks and buy into emerging markets. US central bankers are increasingly confident in their view of the economy. Of the Fed’s 16 voting members, 12 are advocating for one last rate increment this year, bringing the 2018 ...

The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates was largely a nonevent, given how thoroughly markets had expected it. Nonetheless, it offered a comforting reminder that Fed officials know how to do their job — which these days means ignoring public statements from the chief executive and focusing on the economy. For decades, US presidents have refrained from criticising the ...

President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs on China is essentially a tax on Americans, who will pay more for some goods. It’s not a huge cost increase, though, and it might help bring back some of the jobs eliminated by Chinese imports. As a consumer, living without “Made in China” appears to be daunting. In 2005, when US goods ...

London’s ex-Lehman Brothers bankers who’ve been meeting up have found the conversation shifting quickly to Brexit – and whether their next reunion will be in Frankfurt, Paris or somewhere else. As the official March 2019 Brexit deadline looms, banks are in the last stages of preparing for a worst-case “no-deal.” A brutal loss of the City of London’s access to ...

Unilever boss Paul Polman has been conspicuously absent in the controversy over the consumer group’s plan to scrap its dual-headed structure. But the humiliation would be his if UK shareholders veto his plans to create a unified Dutch company. He should get ready to pay them a premium to buy their support. To recap: Unilever’s assets are divided between separate ...