Owing to the rapid spread of solar power, Spanish energy is increasingly cheap. Between 11am and 7pm, the sunniest hours in a sunny country, prices often loiter near zero on wholesale markets (see cha...
India’s stockmarket swooned upon the news that Narendra Modi, the country’s business-friendly prime minister, would return to power diminished and in a coalition after a recent general election. One b...
Things are big in America. That is true of houses, cars and food portions. Perhaps most shocking of all is the size of tips. In much of the rest of the world, gratuities are a small gesture for good s...
Returning from his paternity leave last week, your columnist was keen to get writing. After all, numerous studies say parents’ careers can suffer after they have children. Best to immediately dispel a...
Jun 16th 2024 | San Francisco Is a fresh housing boom under way? In April a house-price index for the world, excluding China, rose by more than 3% year on year (see chart 1 ). American house prices ar...
Queues of idle trucks trying to enter America are standard fare at Mexico’s border. Recently, however, vehicles at the Otay Mesa crossing, which separates California and the city of Tijuana, have been...
Jun 20th 2024 | Washington, DC Listen to this story Your browser does not support the element. Editor’s note (June 20th 2024): The Supreme Court has ruled in Moore v United States, upholding the tax a...
Sixteen years ago American stockmarkets reached their modern nadir. During the early 2000s European and emerging-market equities went on a bull run. By March 2008 America had entered recession and its...
Jun 24th 2024 | Delhi, Istanbul and Singapore In April a New York fried-chicken shop went viral. It was not the food at Sansan Chicken East Village that captured the world’s imagination, but the servi...
Days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Raiffeisen, an Austrian bank, said it was considering selling its business in Russia. Twenty-seven months later, the lender’s unit in the country is do...
Watch professionals play poker, and one of the first things to strike you is how often they fold when the game has barely begun. Rounds of Texas Hold’em, a popular variant, start with each player bein...
Twenty years ago Joshua Cooper Ramo, a consultant, first wrote about the “Beijing consensus”. The Washington consensus of financial liberalisation, floating currencies and openness to foreign capital ...
