Opinion

  In oil markets, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a reputation a little like the one the Russian armed forces used to have — vast and fearsome, a rival you’d be unwise to tangle with. Russia’s aura of military invincibility was dealt a near-fatal blow over the past month in the muddy fields of Ukraine. The Biden administration should ...

Amid the carnage of war in Ukraine, one man appears to feel grimly vindicated, if not quite happy about how things have turned out — the man who played an outsize role in starting the conflict in 2014, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov. Few people are hated as much in Ukraine as Strelkov (I’ll use his nom-de-guerre throughout, since ...

In the global financial crisis, we learned the hard way that excessive leverage can bring down the economy — even if it doesn’t sit directly on the balance sheets of systemic banks. We also learned the importance of robust governance, risk management and controls. Unfortunately, we are seeing evidence that, in some parts of the banking and wider financial system, ...

  Could this mean peace in our time? Positive sounds about a possible ceasefire in Ukraine sparked a surge in global stock markets, particularly in Europe. Oil prices took a dive, and ructions in the bond markets intensified. A Russian announcement that its military was cutting back activity around Kyiv and Chernihiv in the north of Ukraine to concentrate on ...

  By officially accusing the Russian military of committing war crimes in Ukraine, President Joe Biden’s administration has seemingly confirmed the obvious. Vladimir Putin’s troops have so far attacked apartment buildings, hospitals, shopping centres and schools during their invasion of Ukraine. They’ve cut countless Ukrainians off from food, heat, electricity and running water. Thousands of civilians have been wounded or ...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been met with crippling sanctions, brought an untold human and economic cost, and turned it into an international pariah. But one of the most damaging long-term consequences may be the resulting hollowing out of the nation’s vast pool of tech talent. As many as 70,000 information technology workers have already fled the country and another ...

Signs are emerging that the resilience of American consumers is rapidly waning, potentially undermining one of the few remaining pillars supporting the bull market in equities. US households have until recently mostly absorbed higher prices on everything from coffee to chicken to clothes, helping companies maintain fat profit margins despite higher input. But that doesn’t mean consumers were happy about ...

  Shanghai is China’s most important financial hub as well as the regional headquarters of global brands such as Apple Inc, Tesla Inc and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. Until recently, it also executed China’s “dynamic clearing” Covid policy better than the country’s other municipalities. With a staff of over 3,000 conducting contact tracing in the city of 25 ...

  Might Russian President Vladimir Putin drop The Bomb? Unleash a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? It is conceivable. Yet five years ago, it would have seemed fantastic that such a question could be posed about any national leader in the world. For much of the Cold War, prospects of Armageddon filled the nightmares of statesmen and their peoples. During the ...

On the day Russia launched its all-out attack on Ukraine, Svitlana Krakovska was holed up in her home city of Kyiv, working feverishly to finish a report. As leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she and scientists around the world were dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of their sixth assessment of ...