Investors must be wondering what promise New Delhi will break next as the ruling party tries to win upcoming state elections. First, the government made a U-turn on the three laws that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted to use to shake up the stagnant farm economy. Next, he may delay implementing the four codes that have been billed as the ...

There’s a grim inevitability to the fact that the latest concerning strain of the Covid-19 virus — known as B.1.1.529, and now nicknamed the Omicron variant 1 — should have been first identified in South Africa. So far, Sars-CoV-2’s most devastating impacts have been in developed countries. The US, UK and European Union have accounted for about a third of ...

In the 2000s, the growing ubiquity of bank branches was one of America’s great retailing puzzles. Online banking was on the rise and the industry was consolidating, but branches kept popping up seemingly everywhere — if you define “everywhere” as the reasonably affluent parts of cities and suburbs. That ended with the financial crisis. The number of bank branches in ...