Opinion

It’s never safe to ignore China. And it’s still too soon to forget about the pandemic. The country’s rapidly depreciating currency and especially the Covid lockdowns spreading from city to city are raising fears, yet again, of a Chinese shock to global growth. The weakening of the yuan over the last week cannot be ignored. Since Chinese authorities first allowed ...

Until the pandemic hit, companies were becoming more willing to open up about the diversity of their workforce. But even those that embraced transparency went shy on the topic when Covid hit. That suggests they have something to hide when it comes to how they managed staff during the health crisis. A record 173 companies, with a combined market value ...

  Amid all the ominous political news of this season, Democrats have kept their eyes fixed on a ray of hope: States were redrawing the lines that define congressional districts, and Democrats were making out well in the process. “How Democrats are winning congressional redistricting fights” was a CNN.com headline last month. “Republicans built on their existing gerrymanders to try ...

In 2017, France bucked the populist trend by voting for Emmanuel Macron against europhobic Marine Le Pen. In 2022, it has done so again – just as Slovenia looks set to eject its nationalist leader. An overwhelming display of pro-EU values? Not quite. Macron’s lead is narrower than last time — around 58%, rather than 66% — and turnout was ...

The streaming wars took a savage turn this past week. Netflix’s earnings report disappointed investors. CNN+ dropped out of the game entirely, just a month after launching. The result has been a wave of brutal selloffs, making Netflix the worst-performing member of the S&P 500 this year to date. A decade of seemingly perpetual growth came to a halt with ...

  T he UK property market appears in great shape. The Nationwide House Price Index has gained 14% over the past year and rents are rising fast. Supply is tight and borrowing costs remain low despite recent rate increases by the Bank of England (BOE). Something, though, is not quite right — and people in a position to know are ...

No one can doubt President Joe Biden’s commitment to clean energy. Unfortunately, his agenda faces a challenge rarely mentioned by climate activists: excessive regulation. A report from the National Academies of Sciences found that if the US wants to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury, it will need to roughly double the share of electricity it produces from non-carbon sources by ...

After winning a fourth consecutive general election in 1992, the UK Conservative Party chairman told then Prime Minister John Major that they had “stretched the elastic” as far as it would go. Soon after, it snapped. The Tories had been in power for 13 years at that point and had become arrogant and complacent. Major’s government became mired in sleaze ...

It’s painful when prices are soaring for everything, but there are at least two segments of the real estate market where inflation may actually be easing the transition to a new status quo. As the US embarks on its third year following the arrival of Covid-19, there are clear winners and losers arising from how the pandemic has changed the ...

  Savers are about to learn one painful and one surprising lesson about interest rates and banks. First, just because the Federal Reserve is raising rates doesn’t mean the rate investors earn on their cash will rise as much — if at all. In fact, the financial repression in the form of zero rates suffered for more than a dozen ...