Until recently, it seemed like the contentious debate over lockdowns was over. By the end of May, many states were defying the warnings of public-health experts, reopening restaurants, retail and public spaces. The huge protests against police brutality and racism reinforced the notion that keeping Americans confined to their homes was a lost cause. Now, even San Francisco, one of ...

HSBC Holdings Plc had little choice. It’s a measure of how much the world has changed that the 35,000 job cuts it announced in February, a plan that looked like radical surgery at the time, are now almost certainly inadequate. The economic damage wreaked by Covid-19 and the political quagmire into which the bank has sunk over its support for ...

The European Union’s chief antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, has made her name tackling big corporate fish in pretty unconventional ways. A ruling on Alphabet Inc’s Google, which came with a seven-figure fine, argued free services weren’t always good for the consumer, while those on Apple Inc and Starbucks Corp deemed that low taxes were illegal state aid (though some judges ...