Opinion

It’s been more than two years since countries started closing their borders to visitors to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Now China, facing its worst outbreak of the pandemic, is trying a new tactic. Henceforth, “unnecessary” overseas travel by Chinese citizens will also be restricted, supposedly to keep residents from bringing the virus home from abroad. The policy, announced earlier ...

Arbitrary round numbers matter, even though they shouldn’t. The definition of a “bear market” as any peak-to-trough drawdown of 20% or more is unhelpful. The difference between losses of 19.95% and 20.05% is minimal. But the definition is often cited, and it has an impact on how people behave. Which brings us to Friday’s trading, when the proximity of the ...

  It’s beyond disappointing that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to escalate his quarrel with the European Union at this moment, with war raging in Ukraine and unity in the face of Russian aggression of surpassing importance. Unfortunately, it’s not surprising. At issue is the Northern Ireland Protocol, a part of the exit deal Britain struck with the EU ...

  When the global elite meets at the Swiss resort of Davos, for a spring gathering of the World Economic Forum (WEF), war will have forced its way to the top of the agenda. The pandemic has shrunk the annual jamboree of the great and the wealthy. Absent will be Russian oligarchs who hung around in “outer Davos” mostly uninvited ...

Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants “Global Britain” to be seen as a superpower once again. While his Conservative government doesn’t seem quite certain how to manage this, it argued in a landmark policy paper last year that, in one area at least, the goal had already been achieved: The United Kingdom was a “soft-power superpower.” According to the government, this ...

  Winning power is the easy part of politics. It’s what you do with it that counts. That’s going to be the challenge for Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after a striking election victory that has swept the right-of-center Liberal-National Coalition from power after nine years. The scale of victory for Albanese’s Labor party looks surprisingly modest. As a ...

  The oil market is screaming at consumers to rein in their use of fuel. Governments are doing everything they can to have us to buy, buy, buy. But there can only be one winner in this battle, and it won’t be our elected representatives — or us. In March, just after the UK government announced a year-long cut in ...

The Bank of England (BOE) would have preferred to have had more to celebrate on the 25th anniversary of its independence earlier this month. The central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee has one goal, to which everything else is subordinate: to keep overall consumer inflation at 2%. But it has been a year since the inflation rate was that low and ...

The biggest story in Japan was about a man who mistakenly received an entire town’s $360,000 allotment of Covid stimulus money — and chose to gamble it all at an online casino rather than invest. That’s at the heart of an issue once again on the national agenda: Getting the Japanese to put their substantial amount of spare cash into ...

  To soaring prices, plummeting stocks and disrupted supply chains, add another worry for American consumers: an alarming shortage of baby formula. Beyond the current panic, the crisis is an object lesson in how decades of protectionism can culminate in disaster. Reports of empty shelves, rationed supplies, online scams and anxious parents have proliferated in recent weeks. An analysis by ...