Opinion

  The oil market is desperately in need of demand destruction. Governments should either be encouraging behavioral changes such as using more public transportation or allowing expensive fuel to force consumers to change. Instead, industrialised countries are doing the opposite. Call it demand “construction.” From Germany to New Zealand, and from England to California, policymakers are either cutting taxes on ...

  Hanging tough against Vladimir Putin was never going to be cost free. Energy prices are soaring, firms are pulling out of Russia and those that stay are at risk of nationalisation. There’s concern about global food supplies. Recession chatter has started, even as the world economy is still mopping up from the last one. It would be foolish to ...

Inflation is coming for consumers’ pricey pandemic habits. Whether choosing restaurant dinners delivered to their door or at-home meal kits, many Americans have prioritised convenience over cost for the past two years. Food-delivery was a big beneficiary. Some of the top platforms including DoorDash Inc and Uber Eats enjoyed triple-digit growth rates, supercharged by Covid fears and the suspension of ...

  When Rishi Sunak ditched his Thatcherite principles to flood the UK economy with public spending during the pandemic, he fully expected to roll back the largesse soon after. Instead, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer found himself announcing successive new rounds of spending increases and raising taxes to their highest in more than 70 years. Sunak set out to bring ...

  A book published in 1919 on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” isn’t the obvious starting place for understanding the economic consequences of the current war in Ukraine. But it’s worth taking a little time to read John Maynard Keynes’s famous description of the leisurely life of an upper-middle-class Londoner in 1913 — just before the Great War changed ...

The world has been transfixed by Ukraine’s fight for survival. As the war drags on, we’d better start considering what will become of Russia, as well. President Vladimir Putin’s nation has now been subjected to an isolation more sudden and total than that experienced by any major power in recent history. What that leads to may not be pretty. Since ...

A Boeing Co jet carrying 132 people crashed in China after a rapid descent. The headlines had a sense of deja vu, but with one important distinction. The Boeing jet involved in the crash is part of the generation of jets that preceded the company’s infamous Max, which was grounded across the globe for nearly two years after a pair ...

  The business world is in the process of adopting a revolutionary new philosophy — or perhaps having a new philosophy thrust upon it: just-in-case management. In the great age of globalisation that started in the 1980s and entered its triumphant phase in the 1990s and 2000s, the twin watchwords of business were speed and efficiency. Today speed and efficiency ...

Message received loud and clear. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had his foghorn out blaring that there is nothing, repeat nothing, to stop policymakers from yanking interest rates up in half-point steps. His hawkishness prompted the yield curve to flatten to levels not seen since 2016, setting off alarm bells about a potential inversion — where shorter-dated levels rise above ...

“The language people speak in the corridors of power,” former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter once observed, “is not economics or politics. It is history.” In a recent academic article, I showed how true this was after both the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the “9/15” bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Policy makers used all kinds of historical ...