The biggest story in Japan was about a man who mistakenly received an entire town’s $360,000 allotment of Covid stimulus money — and chose to gamble it all at an online casino rather than invest. That’s at the heart of an issue once again on the national agenda: Getting the Japanese to put their substantial amount of spare cash into ...

  To soaring prices, plummeting stocks and disrupted supply chains, add another worry for American consumers: an alarming shortage of baby formula. Beyond the current panic, the crisis is an object lesson in how decades of protectionism can culminate in disaster. Reports of empty shelves, rationed supplies, online scams and anxious parents have proliferated in recent weeks. An analysis by ...

  The UK cost-of-living crisis is becoming increasingly apparent to people, in the growing gap between the wages they earn and what they spend on groceries and fuel bills. But it is also squeezing the most vulnerable in another less visible but no less fundamental part of life — rent. Happily, there are signs both renters and landlords are finding ...