Bloomberg President Donald Trump says he intends to continue holding large campaign rallies regardless of the threat posed by the growing coronavirus outbreak. “We will have tremendous rallies and we’re doing very well and we’ve done a fantastic job with respect to that subject on the virus,” Trump said before dinner on March 7 with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at ...

Bloomberg Taiwan’s Kuomintang selected a reform-minded chairman to rebuild the beleaguered opposition party, a decision that could upend Beijing’s decades-old framework for building ties with Taipei. Lawmaker Chiang Chi-chen overcame the former mayor of Taipei City, Hau Lung-bin, with more than 68% of ballots cast by party members in the March 7 vote. At 48 years of age, Chiang is ...

Bloomberg Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tried to contain the alarm spreading through Europe’s fourth-biggest economy, unveiling drastic measures in the middle of the night to restrict the spread of the deadly coronavirus. In a hastily convened news conference on Sunday, the head of a government already hanging by a thread said that Italy will dramatically restrict movement and activity ...

Bloomberg In picking a running mate, Joe Biden has said he would want to recreate the dynamic he shared with Barack Obama — a working partner who shares his policy vision and also complements his skills and areas of expertise. But there’s so much more at stake in 2020. If the front-running Biden wins the Democratic presidential nomination in Milwaukee ...

Bloomberg An Iranian lawmaker died from the new coronavirus, the first member of parliament to succumb to the disease, as the government reported another surge in infections. Fatemeh Rahbar, 55, went into a coma on March 5 and never recovered, the Islamic Republic News Agency said. Rahbar, elected in February, is the nation’s seventh political figure to die from Covid-19 ...

The Federal Reserve’s first attempt to stabilise the US economy in the face of the threat from the coronavirus seems to have failed. On March 3, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to cut the so-called fed funds interest rate by 50 basis points, from a range of 1.5% to 1.75% to a new range of 1% to 1.25%. ...

When a financial crisis erupted in the US a little more than a decade ago, the impact rapidly spread to all corners of the globe and idled factories in far-distant China. The Covid-19 outbreak has had a similar impact, with manufacturing brought to a halt from a disaster that started in China and escalated worldwide. One example is Hon Hai ...

The coronavirus epidemic has forced governments to make difficult choices. One of the hardest — and perhaps most symbolic — is whether to shut down schools to contain the contagion. Any generalised lockdown would inevitably take a toll on the children and their working parents. The limited evidence we have, however, shows that this measure can be effective in slowing ...

Healthcare stocks took their own victory lap on Joe Biden’s Super Tuesday comeback in the Democratic presidential primary. Shares of health insurers, providers, and drugmakers all outperformed the broader market on March 04. It’s not an entirely unreasonable move. The former vice president’s health policies would be substantially less disruptive to the industry than Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” single-payer ...

The coronavirus outbreak has been turning a lot of us into amateur epidemiologists. Just listen to Mick Mulvaney, the former real estate developer and member of Congress from South Carolina who is now acting White House chief of staff. “The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not Sars, it’s not Mers. It’s not a death sentence, ...