Hong Kong appears to have accepted defeat. Chief Executive Carrie Lam set out a blueprint for undoing the stringent social distancing measures and border curbs that severely curtailed residents’ daily lives for the past two years. Despite the government’s Covid-zero measures, 3.6 million of the city’s 7.3 million residents may have been infected. The statistic reflects badly on Hong Kong. ...

  Covid cases are on the rise in several European countries. Upticks are visible again in France, Italy and the UK. Infection rates in both Austria and Germany eclipse previous waves of the virus (based on cases per million). China is grappling with new highs in terms of case counts. The US may soon follow. This fifth wave of the ...

  Jerome Powell seemed to get the message across this time. After the most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting, bond yields fell as he laid out an extremely hawkish agenda in his press conference. The conventional wisdom is that traders took Powell’s repeated insistence that the economy was strong enough to withstand repeated hikes as reason to be optimistic ...