Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is nobody’s idea of a radical. But in his speech last week to the Economic Club of New York, he articulated an idea that upends generations of conventional wisdom and sets the stage not only for the Fed’s approach to the current economic crisis but also for President Joe Biden’s. “A strong labour market that ...

Ursula von der Leyen did the right thing last week after she’d tried everything else. The European Commission president finally apologised for the failings of the continent-wide vaccine procurement scheme. It followed an unseemly few weeks of battle over the vaccine, during which Von der Leyen scapegoated the Anglo-Swedish pharma company AstraZeneca Plc for supply holdups and threatened to close ...

Time to stop trash-talking inflation. Forecasts for a decent pickup in the pace of price increases ought be welcomed, and we’re a long way from the bad old days of the 1970s. While measures of US inflation gained at the end of last year, they are well below levels desired by the Federal Reserve. In China, consumer prices unexpectedly fell ...