Bloomberg Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is facing a growing revolt by Italian business and political rivals against his strategy for ending a nationwide lockdown that’s being eased for the first time on Monday. Criticism of Conte’s recovery plans and anger among small businesses left out of the first phase of easing are percolating after almost two months of restrictions that ...

My good friend Joel Havemann died the other day. No, he wasn’t a victim of the coronavirus. Since early 1990 at age 46, he had been battling Parkinson’s disease, a struggle that he was bound to lose. The more he succeeded in prolonging life, the weaker he would become at the end of life. As his strength dissipated, he would ...

Crises tend to widen fault lines that already exist. The Covid-19 pandemic has been no exception. Before the virus hit, the unbalanced nature of recent economic growth was already straining federal structures around the world, from the US to India to Europe. The current crisis threatens to open new disagreements and deepen old ones — and transform some political entities ...

You can have a good war and still be seriously wounded. South Korea has been relatively successful at controlling Covid-19 infections, and made good progress in reopening its economy. But it’s still suffering a serious downdraft, with consumers pulling back at home and demand collapsing in key trading partners. Some kind of recession for this trade-dependent economy looks assured; only ...

There’s no question about it: Holding successful elections under current conditions is going to be difficult. The good news is that a group of experts put together by election-law maven Rick Hasen, the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy, has thought through many of the major issues and published solid recommendations for getting it right this November. ...

With his poll numbers looking wobbly, President Donald Trump wants the Lincoln Memorial as backdrop for a Made-for-Fox-News event on May 03 intended to portray him as the kind of leader he is not. It won’t work — not just because the juxtaposition of Trump with Abraham Lincoln is so spectacularly unflattering to the current president. When historians rank American ...

As April turned to May, more than a dozen states opted to relax coronavirus shutdowns and at least partly reopen their economies. This is not a public health decision, but an economic and social one. Still, they can contribute to public health by providing data all 50 states can use. Nobody knows exactly what level of restrictions we need to ...

Lockdowns have devastated retailers and restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic. An easing of restrictions won’t be the magic wand that waves their worries away. Even when it’s possible for consumers to walk freely into their favourite shops, they may be nervous about doing so. That puts the onus on retailers to make their locations as reassuring as possible. ...

Bloomberg Stocks fell in most of the world while US index futures edged lower in a sign the risk-off move that hit markets at the start of this month may have further to run. The dollar climbed. The Stoxx Europe 600 slumped at the open, with all 19 industry sectors down. Contracts on the three main American indexes traded in ...

Bloomberg Sell in May and go away? The negative start to the month raises concern that the partial recovery in April is going to be about as good as it gets for risk assets. For all the optimism stemming from the gradual easing of lockdown measures in some of the biggest economies, there are too many worries on the minds ...