Opinion

The dark horse of India’s battery race is pulling away from the pack, but can it beat the bookies’ favourite? Ola Electric Mobility Pvt, a Bengaluru-based startup, will get state support to manufacture EV batteries that can store a total of 20 gigawatt-hours of power, the government said. Reliance Industries Ltd, the country’s largest conglomerate, will get subsidies for five ...

  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded the US and Europe that their alliance matters. Their united response to President Vladimir Putin’s assault on the international order should alert them to something else — that resilience depends on economic and financial cooperation and not just on formal security commitments. In that light, reviving stalled talks on a free-trade agreement is ...

  To help fight inflation, Joe Biden ought to take a page out of his former boss’ book: He should make a strong pitch for taxing the rich to reduce the federal budget deficit. From the day his party suffered a massive midterm “shellacking” straight through his successful re-election campaign, Barack Obama branded the Democrats as the party of deficit ...

  Germany announced plans to switch away from Russian oil. It’s a laudable goal, but the logistics of doing so present an immense hurdle. With (almost) no oil production of its own, Germany depends on imports. Those come in two forms — crude oil for processing in the country’s refineries and finished products such as the diesel fuel that powers ...

Every year on July 31, on the site of an 18th-century coffee plantation in the Jamaican village of Woodside, there is a reenactment of Emancipation Day in 1838 when the slaves were freed by Royal Proclamation. People perform a memorial play, cite the proclamation and debate its meaning. The characters ask, “why should God save the Queen and not the ...

  The financial strictures imposed on Russia have put a spotlight on cryptocurrencies. Could the Russian government, or sanctioned officials, use digital assets to hide and move their wealth, undermining efforts to punish President Vladimir Putin’s regime for its bloody war in Ukraine? Here’s where things stand: Global illicit crypto activity amounted to $14 billion in 2021 — or about ...

  Judging by official Chinese media, President Xi Jinping appears to have focused more on the question of Taiwan than the Russian invasion of Ukraine when he spoke with his US counterpart Joe Biden. If Xi fears US support for what he calls “Taiwan independence” forces, many US analysts worry about the opposite — that China might be inspired by ...

If peace in Ukraine looks depressingly far away, accountability seems beyond another galaxy. What are the chances Vladimir Putin will appear in a courtroom to answer for the hell he’s unleashed in Ukraine? They seem vanishingly small. And yet, national leaders, politicians, global organisations and an army of individuals are working to build the war crimes case against Putin and ...

The day after the US lifted its trade embargo on Burma in 2012, I spoke to an executive at Coca-Cola Co. He proudly announced that his company already had people on a plane headed to the country. It is Coca-Cola’s policy, he explained, to sell its beverages anywhere it’s allowed to do so. Coke was sold in Russia during the ...

  If you’re looking for a case-study in economic groupthink, try Googling the phrase “Fed behind the curve.” Informed opinion, it seems, has congealed behind a conventional wisdom that the US Federal Reserve has been too slow to restrain accelerating inflation. Such widespread confidence would seem to require unambiguous evidence. But where is it? At least one eminent economist thinks ...