Opinion

Talks between Russia, the US and Europe have hit an impasse over Russia’s demand that Nato agree not to admit any new members. So far, the Biden administration and European leaders have rejected such terms. In so doing, they risk giving Russian President Vladimir Putin an excuse to invade Ukraine. But caving to Putin’s blackmail would be even worse. Putin ...

  There is no shortage of candidates for the title of the most dangerous business idea of the moment. Management-by-algorithm may remove what humanity there is left in the corporate world. The office-less future may dissolve workers into angst-ridden atoms. I want to suggest a less obvious contender for the title: “social purpose.” The idea of social purpose can be ...

If tech billionaires were targeted by China’s rulers last year, it looks like the millionaire civil servants are next. “Zero Tolerance,” a new five-part documentary jointly produced by CCTV and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the powerful anti-corruption agency, signals just that. In the nine months ending September, CCDI opened about 407,000 cases and punished 438,000 people, the most ...

  It’s official: Americans are paying up for their favourite goods. December saw the biggest 12-month gain in inflation since 1982. Last week, Procter & Gamble Co. raised its sales outlook for the year to the end of June on the back of higher prices. In the three months to December 31, organic sales (which exclude the impact of currency ...

  Bonds are sliding and forecasts for US interest rate increases are escalating rapidly. Borrowing costs have moved up in the UK, South Korea, New Zealand and a swathe of emerging markets. There are outliers, however. Among them, Asia’s two most powerful economies: China, which cut a key rate this week, and Japan, a country that’s battled deflation for a ...

  The head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Agustin Carstens, set out a dark vision for our financial future, quoting Goethe’s “Faust” and claiming that the “soul” of money was at stake. He warned that the proliferation of unregulated cryptocurrencies and the spread of Big Tech firms into payments risked damaging consumer trust and splitting the monetary system. ...

In cyberwarfare, the toughest question to answer definitively is “Who did it?” It’s no surprise then that Microsoft Corp avoided the attribution on everyone else’s lips in its analysis of cyberattacks on Ukraine. That would be Russia. But several clues suggest they not only came from the Kremlin but will follow a pattern of spilling into other countries in Europe ...

  About a year ago around this time, on impulse, people bought a Nintendo Switch — and they’ve never looked back. Stuck indoors for months at a time in 2021, people took up the controllers with youthful enthusiasm. Games — whether it was on the Switch, PlayStation or PC — allowed people to escape the four walls of their apartment ...

Citigroup Inc has long been valued like a European bank. Its British-born Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser has reached for a European-style solution, but so far investors aren’t impressed. The bank is on a mission to reshape its sprawling global businesses and make them simpler and easier to understand. It wants to invest in the parts of the bank that ...

  You don’t see them, but they’re there: hundreds of thousands of people sitting at keyboards for hours on end to keep online services humming along seamlessly. It can seem like the internet operates entirely automatically, but it doesn’t. Humans are often hidden behind the scenes, working in real time to verify your identity, flag hate speech or caption videos. ...