Opinion

Nothing makes you appreciate air-conditioning like high summer in India. In Delhi, temperatures are running over 100 degrees for much of the day, with two full months still to go before the cooling monsoon rains arrive. Unfortunately, just as everyone decided to crank up their ACs or at least their ceiling fans, electricity supply collapsed under the strain in large ...

  The Philippines is having the kind of recovery that would make any emerging-market star envious. After a tough pandemic and deep recession, the economy will outpace many of its neighbors this year and leave China — once the gold standard for rapid expansion — in the dust. Whoever wins the presidential election in a few days will inherit a ...

  Much as expected, the Federal Reserve has raised its policy interest rate by half a percentage point and announced an accelerated schedule for reducing its holdings of financial assets. This is a faster pace of tightening than the central bank intended after its previous meeting in March. With inflation at 5.2% on the Fed’s preferred measure and little sign ...

It may still be hard to believe, despite all the Russian military bungling, that Ukraine can win the war against its much bigger neighbour. Yet, as the underdog, Ukraine actually has more scenarios in which it can credibly declare victory. If it survives as an independent state — which appears almost certain now that Vladimir Putin has had to scale ...

As Twitter users everywhere brace for changes to their beloved platform under new ownership, no group is more anxious about Elon Musk’s intentions than the large and highly influential community of democracy activists and human-rights advocates. And arguably, no other group has more at stake. Certainly, none has a closer appreciation of the platform’s potential — for both good and ...

  Hong Kong has undergone wrenching changes that were all but unimaginable little more than two years ago. The remaking of the city in the wake of pro-democracy protests in 2019 has touched upon areas such as freedom of speech and the legal system that are pillars of its standing as an international financial center. Yet if there is one ...

  In the space of a few short months, the prevailing narrative on US inflation has veered from “It’s transitory” to “We have a problem.” The Federal Reserve took another step towards acknowledging this, raising its policy rate by 50 basis points and leading investors to expect a faster pace of tightening from now on. That’s fine, you might say, ...

It’s been more than two years since Apple Inc issued revenue guidance. The iPhone maker initially blamed the Covid-19 pandemic, and later added chip shortages, for its inability to forecast the future. Yet the move is part of a worrying trend toward decreasing transparency at the world’s largest company. On January 28, 2020, just as lockdown measures were shutting parts ...

What was good for Sri Lanka under British colonial rule 75 years ago may be worth a try again. Or at least that’s what Mark Mobius, the former emerging markets guru at Franklin Templeton Investments, seems to be suggesting. To regain the confidence of investors, the bankrupt Indian Ocean island could consider swapping its central bank with a currency board, ...

  When consumer prices began soaring last year, a trade union representing staff at the European Central Bank (ECB) demanded their wages increase in lockstep with inflation. This grassroots effort to index pay to price increases was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was incendiary stuff coming from the supposed guardians of euro-area price stability. Indexation, after all, can determine who is ...