Opinion

When the first golden arches appeared in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990, it didn’t matter that it was mid-winter. It was as if the snow in Narnia had begun to melt, and the natural state of things was being returned in glorious technicolor. Russians queued around the corner for a taste of once forbidden patties. “If you can’t go to ...

  The British public is in danger of being crushed under an avalanche of political gossip. The faces of big-name pundits — most prominently Andrew Marr and Piers Morgan — stare out from the sides of buses. A dozen national newspapers splash the latest revelations about “party-gate” or “curry-gate” on their front pages as if they are matters of war ...

  Rising US interest rates, sky-high oil prices, soaring inflation, a foreign war. Then, naturally, a recession. The trajectory may sound awfully familiar, but I’m not describing the present-day American economy. Instead, this is what the US looked like in early 1990. The commodity market now fears a repetition — with another cycle of rising interest rates, expensive oil and ...

Of the many diplomatic spats and snubs that summarize the dismal relations between the UK and its historic continental frenemy of France, one phrase sticks in the mind: “Prenez un grip, and donnez-moi un break.” The patronising put-down by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, delivered in purposely poor franglais, was aimed squarely at a furious Emmanuel Macron after the September ...

Along with the Pixel phones, watches and earbuds at Google’s annual showcase of software and devices last week came a pair of nifty-looking translation glasses. Put them on and real-time “subtitles” appear on the lenses as you watch a person speaking in a different language. Very cool. But the glasses aren’t commercially available. It’s also unlikely they will make anywhere ...

  Promoting competition is a laudable goal, one that President Joe Biden has rightly made a priority for his administration. Yet in its efforts to apply Biden’s directive in the banking industry, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation could well achieve the opposite result — and deepen the anticompetitive moat that already surrounds the country’s largest financial institutions. Citing the president’s ...

  Prices rose in the US by 8.3% in the year to April, only a little less than the increase of 8.5% in the year to March. Most economists had expected a bigger decline. Inflation, it seems, might have peaked, but the vital question is how quickly it will fall back to an acceptable level. At the moment, the answer ...

  In the days following the landslide victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr, friends and colleagues in the US and Europe with memories of his father’s kleptocracy asked me how this could have happened. With all the forces working in Marcos’s favour, a more pertinent query might be: What was going to stop it? If you spent time before the Philippines’s ...

From India to Indonesia, Elon Musk is scouting out sites to make more Teslas for global roads. With the world mired in supply chain chaos, access to materials matters most. He’s got it right. After lobbying against India’s tight policies around manufacturing and prohibitive import duties, Musk is headed to meet Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo and visit several areas across ...

  In recent days, about half a dozen investors in Hong Kong and New York who blame the US Securities and Exchange Commission for the recent selloff in China’s technology companies were being spoken to. They say they’ve spotted a pattern: provisional delisting announcements by the Washington regulator have tended to precede a drop in the broader market. On March ...