Before the pandemic, 100,000 seafarers travelled in and out of the world’s ports every month. Some had spent weeks or months aboard the cargo ships, tankers and other merchant vessels that are essential to moving products and commodities across the globe. In a ritual little noticed outside the industry, new crews would regularly arrive to relieve them, ensuring that the ...

The economic fallout for Italy from Covid-19 is going to hammer its already precarious government finances. The country’s 1.7 trillion-euro ($1.9 trillion) debt mountain is the largest in Europe, and there will no doubt be a substantial jump in its ratio of debt to gross domestic product from 135% to beyond 150%. Nevertheless, Rome’s ability to manage its borrowings may ...

Andrew Bailey, the new Bank of England (BOE) governor, was at pains in an FT interview to draw a clear distinction between the BOE’s bulk buying of bonds and its direct financing of the British government’s coronavirus spending plans. The latter simply wasn’t going to happen, he said, because it would damage the central bank’s credibility in pursuing its defining ...