World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Stocks have fallen to near-bear market territory. Bonds have suffered big price declines. Foreign currencies have nosedived against the US dollar. Cryptocurrencies, SPACs and other speculations have collapsed. But commodities have been on a tear. The Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index has surged 33%…

President Joseph Biden couldn’t have beaten Donald Trump in 2020 without the support of Big Tech and Black voters. Donations from Silicon Valley employees and political action committees gave the former vice president a critical cash advantage in the final scramble to election day, while Black…

Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is now 83 years old and one could see the signs of old age in his face and movements. There are recurrent news and rumors about his chronic conditions and bad health but this has never been based on any evidence nor has it been…

Despite all the Iranian propaganda about the power of the “Quds Force” and its expansion in the region, the Revolutionary Guard’s branch is now being chased down by Israel and its members are being assassinated inside Tehran. In football lingo, this means that Israel is now playing with Iran the…

What is going on between Iran and Israel has no other name than war. The war continues with or without Qassem Soleimani and whether there is a Likud government or anti-Likud government in power. This war is mostly being fought on and above Syrian territory. However, some of it is being fought…

China's economy is more than a weak spot in a faltering global expansion. Growth this year, assuming there is any, will likely fall well short of Beijing's own projections. The country may even turn in a worse performance than the US for the first time in more than a generation. These are momentous…

Will inflation — or efforts to tame it — lead to a recession in the US? When such fears arise, people start paying a lot of attention to weekly unemployment-insurance claims, as an early indicator of layoffs that could augur a broader slump. They should be careful. Unemployment claims are a…

What do you get when three pandemics coincide with a drought? The most expensive chicken we’ve seen in years. Prices for the world’s most consumed meat have been surging in recent months. Retail whole chickens in the US cost $1.79 per pound in April, the highest price in 15 years of records and…

We don’t talk much about helicopter money anymore. After a debate that raged through the early days of the pandemic, it’s all but fallen off the map as a topic. That’s hardly surprising, given how radically economic conditions have changed. Rather than worrying about how to shore up a collapsing…

The bad news for President Joe Biden is that his popularity has fallen, this past week, into dead last place. Of the 13 presidents during the polling era, none has been in worse shape at this point in his first term, almost 500 days into a presidency, than Biden’s 40.5% approval rating. That’s…

Temperatures are rising across the US, and so is the cost of the chlorine tablets commonly used to sanitize the water in swimming pools. A 35-pound bucket of trichlor tablets is typically enough to last the average owner of a midsize pool an entire summer. That bucket costs $199 now at Leslie’s…

It’s not easy being second in command. China’s Premier Li Keqiang, sidelined for years by President Xi Jinping, should know this better than anyone else. In recent weeks, Li has re-emerged with his own voice. He has been pressing officials to stabilize an economy ravaged by draconian Covid…