With inflation running at more than six percent and President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in peril, ’tis the season for second-guessing. So I’d like to focus on what may well have been the original sin of the Biden administration and the narrow Democratic majority in Congress: last February’s decision to reject Senate Republicans’ offer of a $600 billion Covid ...

A global shortage of semiconductors will ease a little in 2022 — likely driving stock prices down — leaving a lot of executives, bankers and shareholders left to question their ebullience in pouring record amounts of money into production facilities, and sending the market value of chipmakers ever higher. But it’ll take a while before the real pain from such ...

  For asset managers, next year is shaping up to be challenging, to say the least. Faster inflation will prompt central banks to slow, stop and possibly reverse their monetary support of economies, making financial markets trickier to negotiate. The pandemic is far from over. The industry will face even more pressure to allocate assets in environmentally friendly ways without ...

  For Americans under 50, inflation is little more than a theoretical concept. But for those of us born in the late 1950s and 1960s, the inflation of the 1970s was a formative experience we’d rather not repeat. Inflation was as much a part of our childhood as Covid is for today’s kids. It was always there in the background. ...

  Bloomberg US aviation regulators expanded their warning about 5G service set to launch January 5 on new frequencies, saying potential interference could have a broad impact on aircraft safety systems. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a Safety Alert for Operators warning that “a wide range” of aircraft safety devices could malfunction and laid out the process it will follow ...

  Bloomberg US holiday sales jumped 8.5% from last year as consumers spent more money on clothes, jewelry and electronics, a report from Mastercard SpendingPulse showed. Sales grew across the board, both in stores and online, for the holiday season defined as November 1 to December 24. Consumers started searching for gifts earlier than usual with supply chains roiling retailers ...

  Bloomberg Japan’s retail sales increased for a third straight month, as easing virus concerns fueled spending by consumers before the emergence of the Omicron variant. Sales advanced 1.2% in November from the previous month, as shoppers spent more on clothing and motor vehicles, the industry ministry reported Monday. Economists had expected a 1.3% overall gain. While Japan’s consumption hasn’t ...

  Bloomberg The C-suite is a bundle of nerves this winter. A new survey shows that 72% of chief executive officers are worried about losing their jobs in 2022 because of business disruptions, tracking closely with the 94% of bosses who say their corporate models need to be overhauled within three years. “That’s eye-poppingly high,” says Simon Freakley, the CEO ...

Bloomberg China’s industrial firms are doing much better this year than in 2020, but the improvement in profits is patchy, with miners and raw material providers benefiting from higher commodity prices at the expense of manufacturers. In the first 11 months of the year, industrial profits climbed 38% from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. ...

  Bloomberg Russia will start talks first with the US on its demands for guarantees of an end to Nato’s eastward expansion before a proposed January 12 meeting between the military alliance and Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “We will hold the main round of negotiations with the US which will take place immediately after the end of the ...