Human behaviour during Covid has upended one of the most fundamental assumptions of economics, even if economists haven’t yet come around to admitting it. In sum: People are worse at big, important decisions than previously thought, and better at small, trivial ones. Standard economics theory holds that people make relatively good decisions when there is a lot at stake. At ...

As Britain basked in a mini-heatwave over the long weekend, you could have almost forgotten there were any remaining Covid-19 restrictions on restaurants. But social distancing, mandatory table service and a ban on groups larger than six are still in place in England until June 21, limiting the amount of people venues can squeeze in and crimping their profits. Keeping ...

The US housing market is on fire, with the supply of available homes falling drastically short of pandemic-stoked demand. Worrywarts are calling it a “crisis” and circulating weird tales of buyer desperation — including one about a supplicant in Bethesda, Maryland who apparently offered to name her first-born child after a seller — and warnings of stunted recoveries. Or maybe ...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s “mystery” may be moving towards resolution. When she led the Federal Reserve, Yellen puzzled over inflation’s failure to fire despite low unemployment, years of shallow interest rates and several rounds of quantitative easing. Claudio Borio, a top official at the Bank for International Settlements, likened the situation to peering through a looking glass: Central banks that ...

Bloomberg Malaysia will summon China’s ambassador to protest flights by 16 air force planes over the South China Sea that Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein says were a “breach of Malaysian airspace and sovereignty.” The “suspicious” Chinese aircraft were spotted near the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, the Royal Malaysian Air Force said in a statement. They entered the Malaysian maritime ...

Bloomberg Opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, a former deputy in Russia’s lower house of parliament, was detained, Tass reported, citing unidentified people in law enforcement. Lera Gudkova, the politician’s wife, confirmed the detention via Facebook and said his aunt was also being held in the case. His detention comes amid a widening crackdown against opponents of President Vladimir Putin since Kremlin ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden visited Tulsa to mark the 100th anniversary of a White mob’s destruction of the city’s once-thriving Black business district, where he said Vice President Kamala Harris would lead efforts to pass a new federal expansion of voting rights. Biden visited privately with survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst episodes of racial violence ...

Bloomberg Budapest will rename the streets surrounding the planned campus of a Chinese university to protest against the project, which Hungary’s opposition says is emblematic of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s drift from western democratic values. The streets in the capital’s industrial south, where Fudan University plans to set up a campus, will be renamed Uighur Martyrs street, Dalai Lama street ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden announced measures to increase the number of federal contracts awarded to small, disadvantaged businesses. He also said he had directed his administration to more aggressively prevent discrimination in home appraisals, a detriment for wealth accumulation for Black families. Last week, Biden reiterated calls for Congress to overhaul US policing as he met with the family of ...

Bloomberg The French government will use algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify small firms at risk of collapse in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and provide as much as $3.7 billion to protect them. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire presented the new measures as part of a plan that also includes an extension of crisis lending facilities to the ...