If Britons wanted a reason to protest against institutional racism, or police brutality, they didn’t have to look 6,400 kilometers away. There have been plenty of local examples over the years. “I can’t breathe” will have resonated with many black families here. That’s why the killing of George Floyd has been a call to action in the UK too. An estimated 137,500 people have attended more than 200 protests in recent days. One produced an iconic picture of global outr

Viewpoints June 15, 2020

April Ryan, a veteran White House correspondent with American Urban Radio Networks and a political analyst for CNN, reported Tuesday afternoon that President Donald Trump is planning a major address on “race relations” in the US. The speech, Ryan said, is being written by Stephen Miller, the young Trump loyalist on the White House staff who has coaxed the president into approving policies like separating migrant children from their parents and incarcerating them at the Mexican border

Viewpoints June 15, 2020

It’s always interesting to see who’s celebrating. In German politics, that’s currently the Left Party, a descendant of East Germany’s former dictatorship that likes to brew anti-Americanism and Russophilia into a toxic populist mix. The party’s bosses are delighted about a rumor, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that the US may pull out some 9,500 of the 34,500 American troops stationed in Germany, and then cap their numbers at 25,000. Dietmar Bartsch, th

Viewpoints June 12, 2020

I returned to the office this week, joining thousands of bankers from Citigroup to Morgan Stanley that are trickling back to their desks in Hong Kong. After almost five months working from home, it’s going to take some getting used to. The easing of coronavirus lockdowns heralds the beginning of the end for the world’s greatest work-from-home experiment. Perhaps. Twitter will let employees work from home permanently even after the outbreak recedes, while others such as Google have s

Viewpoints June 11, 2020

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants all 1.3 billion Indians to be “vocal for local” -- meaning, to not just use domestically made products but also to promote them. As an overseas citizen living in Hong Kong, I’m doing my bit by very vocally demanding Indian mangoes on every trip to the grocery. But half the summer is gone, and not a single slice so far. My loss is due to India’s COVID-19 lockdown, which has severely pinched logistics, a perennial challenge in the huge, i

Viewpoints June 11, 2020

Beijing is scrubbing up. Late last week, the central bank excluded so-called clean coal from a draft list of projects eligible for green bonds. It’s a significant move that puts the world’s No. 2 issuer on the path toward consistency with international norms, making it easier to attract the foreign capital required to finance hundreds of billions of dollars of environmental fixes. The next logical step will be to tackle what companies are allowed to do with the cash they raise. So-ca

Viewpoints June 9, 2020

It came as no surprise that a fourth round of trade negotiations between the UK and the EU has produced no big breakthrough. Once again, there is talk about Britain separating from the EU in December without a trade deal in place; Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told banks this week to prepare for just that. Why hasn’t the coronavirus pandemic changed the Brexit narrative, forced an outbreak of reasonableness between UK and EU negotiators or at least made compromise more likely? It&rsq

Viewpoints June 8, 2020

What pushed former Defense Secretary James Mattis over the edge, to denounce President Donald Trump in the strongest possible terms? Only the former general knows for sure, but a clue is provided by the title of his statement: “In Union There Is Strength.” Another clue is provided by the most important words in his text: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people -- does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divid

Viewpoints June 8, 2020

On Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that the executive branch will designate Antifa as a “terrorist organization,” apparently in an attempt to pin blame for the weekend’s violent protests on the loose collection of far-left activists. The president’s announcement was characteristically unclear. Federal law says that if the Secretary of State designates a group as a foreign terrorist organization, then materially supporting that organization becomes a very serious f

Viewpoints June 4, 2020

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that’s orbiting the Earth with two US astronauts is the picture of New Space Age glamour. It’s a sleek, stylish commercially made capsule that’s destined to be featured beside Italian sports cars in future design textbooks. Just don’t tell that to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive and chief designer. “Is a Ferrari more reliable than a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?” he once asked a space journalist. The answer, of cou

Viewpoints June 3, 2020

The Chinese consumer has been one of the most important drivers of the world economy over the past decade, fueling hopes of prolonged growth and profits. So it’s worth looking at what’s happening to household balance sheets as COVID-19 wreaks havoc on a population now feeling the downside of growing personal leverage from the boom. In the last major financial crisis, big-spending Americans were hit hard, but the Chinese found new ways to open their wallets and took the rest of the

Viewpoints June 1, 2020

President Donald Trump is preparing to exit his second arms-control treaty with Russia since taking the oath of office, and the opposition is already in high dudgeon. “This is insane,” tweeted former CIA director Michael Hayden. “Another shortsighted Trump move to abandon a treaty that includes many close allies,” tweeted Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations.　 But Trump’s decision is the right one -- both in the details and on principle. The dea

Viewpoints May 27, 2020

The coronavirus has disrupted the world in very large ways. While that battle has been waged, however, another event has almost been missed: the birth of a new kind of fiat currency, which could forever reshape the relationship between money, economic power and geopolitical clout.　 An official Chinese digital yuan, more than five years in the making, is now in pilot runs to slowly start replacing the physical legal tender. If the experiment succeeds, this new cash, valued the same as the famili

Viewpoints May 26, 2020

How much more stimulus can the Chinese economy take? It’s a question of crucial importance after Beijing unveiled its 2020 economic policy plans Friday. China’s 4 trillion yuan ($562 billion) stimulus package in the wake of the global financial crisis paved the way for its transformation over the past decade. In the 2000s, the country was a low-cost assembly room for the world’s supply chains. Now it’s an increasingly confident middle-income power, with a burgeoning c

Viewpoints May 25, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic depression are going to require huge amounts of government spending. The US government is devoting resources to halting the outbreak. It’s sustaining businesses during shutdowns so that they don’t have to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s paying the bills for workers who’ve lost their jobs. It’s bailing out state and local governments whose tax revenues are disappearing and can’t finance budget deficits. And it&r

Viewpoints May 21, 2020