World News Insights: Opinion Articles

It’s time for big, passive investors like FMR LLC (Fidelity), Vanguard Group and BlackRock Inc., sitting on trillions of dollars of assets, to use their heft as shareholders and protect corporate governance standards. It’s no longer enough to simply shovel money into index funds and ETFs. As…

If there’s any scandal revealed by the emails of Anthony Fauci, recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request by journalists, it’s that scientists were wildly clueless at the start of the pandemic. They didn’t know what to do about the pandemic, when and how to deploy masks, or where…

A few days ago, a new law was issued in North Korea. It was described by the Western media as intending to eradicate all forms of foreign influence: Punishment that goes as far as the death penalty for anyone caught acquiring Western movies or wearing foreign clothes. Speaking some of the country’s…

The job market recovery is looking better for 2023 and 2024, even while this year's forecasts need to be reined in a bit. The best evidence for the optimistic outlook is coming from a surprising place: teenagers. The last two jobs reports poured cold water on the hope that we could add a million…

In “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez imagines an enduring love triangle between two passionate people — Florentino and Fermina — and a punctilious doctor, Juvenal Urbino, whom Fermina is persuaded by her father to marry. Trained as a physician in Paris, Dr. Urbino is a national…

Never mind the return to normal, Wall Street’s private equity shops are staging a return to abnormal. Leveraged buyouts are happening at a speed and extravagance that had been unique to 2006 and 2007, the run-up to the financial crisis. Private equity firms have already made $470 billion of…

Thanks to a technicality of British parliamentary procedure, Boris Johnson has managed to avert an embarrassing showdown with lawmakers from his own party over the UK government’s budget for foreign aid. But Parliament will still get to vent on the issue Tuesday, and plenty of other divisions are…

After four-plus months of Joe Biden’s presidency, we can finally say something about his polling numbers with a fair degree of confidence: His initially high disapproval numbers, second only to Donald Trump during the polling era, were likely an artifact of partisanship and had little to do with…

One year on from the protests against racism and police violence that swept European cities such as Paris and London after George Floyd’s death, it’s fair to say the initial impact was short-lived. Protesters confronted politicians, toppled statues and sparked changes — including a pledge to stop…

If you want an example of how major Western companies manage their great taxation sidestep, take a look at Apple Inc.’s chief supplier. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group and the largest assembler of iPhones, booked $57.4 billion in revenue from the…

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is staging its next big act in China. The last time the global investment banking giant made a similarly big play was 15 years ago and it was tremendously rewarding. It was, as the Wall Street firm said then, a “historic investment.” This latest overture involves the same…

Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories…