World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The great rotation in consumer spending continues. When the world shut down in 2020, we bought what we needed to stay home: Pelotons, pets, sweatpants and sourdough starter. In 2021, our shopping reflected reopening: We put on lipstick again, whitened our teeth and swapped loungewear for chinos…

It was a warm spring evening in Taipei and more than a hundred celebrities, founders, venture capitalists and tech executives gathered for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. The headline event, a fireside chat, was just an excuse for Taiwan’s best-connected people to socialize, enjoying the kinds of…

Businesses have increased their profits at the same time that they have raised their prices, so it’s natural to ask whether profiteering is responsible for inflation. The numbers support the idea that companies have widened their profit margins through higher prices. According to data from the…

Among the most prominent headlines of the French presidential elections, if not the most prominent, is the left’s decline. This decay is remarkable to everyone commenting on those elections: for decades, France has been split between two “peoples”, the “people of the left” and the “people of the…

China’s push for global supremacy is playing out in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, but also in the quieter coercion that Beijing practices every day. The latest target of this pressure is Lithuania, which is paying an economic price for snubbing China diplomatically. The case is a…

With inflation now rising faster than at any time in the last four decades, economists are debating which group suffers more from inflation, the poor or the rich. This kind of economy-wide question is not easy to answer, especially when rates of inflation have been so low in recent times and hard…

As Omicron, the newest variant of Covid-19, made landfall in Europe over the weekend, governments across the continent faced a quandary: How to put their citizens on alert without causing panic? The conundrum was made even more complicated by the fact that nobody — not even the world Health…

Lofty prices for parody coins. Celebrity-driven commercials for trading platforms. A frenzy over non-fungible tokens that has enticed famous names including former first lady Melania Trump. Even after a pullback in the past month, the cryptocurrency market remains full of frothy behavior. Yet…

The Middle East will not witness another Sadat moment. Washington will not wake up to a sudden shift of its Middle Eastern allies from the Western camp to the Chinese side, just as Egypt moved with the late President Anwar Sadat from the East to the West camp. However, the American “obsession”…

Responding to stubbornly rising inflation, the US Federal Reserve has pledged to raise interest rates more quickly than expected, which will likely dampen a red-hot housing market. On the other hand, it could be that the housing market is booming because it is on the cusp of a fundamental shift —…

A few months ago, it looked like a cascading global power crunch was about to turn back the tide of the energy transition. In China, shortages of coal drove prices of solid fuel to 1,908.20 yuan per metric ton ($299.29), leading to power cuts and industrial shutdowns as generators refused to…

A federal appeals court overseeing the consolidation of dozens of legal challenges to the Biden administration’s Covid-19 testing and vaccine mandates for businesses ruled on Friday evening that the White House’s effort can move forward. Demonstrating that common sense and a healthy regard for…