You might not be interested in stagflation but stagflation is interested in you. It has been more than a generation since anyone used that scary word in earnest. I have vague untutored memories of being a child in the 1970s amid talk of stagflation — simultaneously rising prices and unemployment. But it is hard to

How well did you keep up with the news this week? Take our quiz. Joe Biden has decided to water down a new Asian economic policy in an eleventh-hour move to attract more countries to join the deal that he will unveil in Tokyo on Monday. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a response to criticism

Inflation across the G7 has climbed to multi-decade highs, but whereas in the US or UK that means alarming levels of 8 or 9 per cent, one country stands out as different: in Japan, high inflation means just 2.5 per cent. Furthermore, while the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are rushing to

If you want to see Sydney in full boomtown spate, go to Margaret on a Friday night. Opened last year by Neil Perry, the elder statesman of modern Australian cuisine, Margaret is the city’s table to get by any means possible. The hype is justified: the food, with flavours of Europe and the Levant and east

Elon Musk has responded to a media report alleging that SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 to settle claims of sexual harassment against him, saying the “wild accusations are utterly untrue”. On Thursday, Business Insider published an article claiming that Musk’s aerospace company made the payment to the unidentified flight attendant in 2018 as part

Clockwise from bottom left: Isabel Marant nylon Wiley bag, 365. Balenciaga acetate sunglasses, £305. Diemme suede, leather and rubber Possagno boots, £255. Pangaia recycled cotton bucket hat, £70. Hermès In the Pocket binoculars with leather case, £2,750. Finisterre Tritan-plastic water bottle, £20. Ganni recycled cotton scrunchie, £20. A-COLD-WALL* jersey and elastane balaclava, POA. Bottega Veneta

It’s back at par and on the defensive, but the questions about Tether’s recent detachment from its $1 peg value are not going away. The world’s most popular stablecoin on Thursday posted a letter from MHA Cayman, an offshore outpost of UK mid-tier accountants MHA MacIntyre Hudson, that attests for consolidated total assets of just

China has cut its main mortgage interest rate by the most on record as it seeks to reduce the economic impact of Covid-19 lockdowns and a property sector slowdown. The five-year loan prime rate was lowered from 4.6 per cent to 4.45 per cent on Friday. The reduction in the rate, which is set by

The sky above the Ukrainian city of Lviv lit up in the early hours of Tuesday after a volley of precision missiles fired from Russian vessels in the Black Sea destroyed a nearby weapons depot. The strikes, just 40km from the Polish border, were an explosive reminder of the threat posed by Russia’s naval forces

Richard Thalheimer remembers the last time inflation was proving so challenging to US retailers: it was when he was trying to get The Sharper Image off the ground in the late 1970s and 1980s.  In 2006 he left the consumer gadgets chain he founded, selling his stake before its 2008 bankruptcy. Ever since, he has

When the government last year transformed the way freelance contractors are hired by private sector businesses, there were widespread complaints the move would hurt the UK’s economy and penalise the self-employed. There were even concerns that key specialists such as IT experts, engineers and accountants, would flee the country en masse, that companies would refuse

Riding the Q train back to Brooklyn from Manhattan one evening this week, my subway carriage was boarded by a man who kept on glaring intently at the other passengers, swigging from a bottle of AriZona Iced Tea and calling out, “Repent, repent, repent”. When he shouted “Go quickly, before it’s too late” as the

Sexual misconduct allegations at a prominent New York asset manager have ignited a multimillion-dollar legal dispute that offers a revealing insight into the inner workings of the business. GoldenTree Asset Management, a hedge fund that manages $47bn of credit market investments on behalf of public pension funds and other institutional clients, fired its chief operating

The $40bn collapse last week of popular crypto token Luna underscores the crucial role exchanges play as gatekeepers that rule on which digital assets are readily available to mainstream traders. Fierce competition among exchanges has led to a sharp rise in the number of tokens available on platforms that are popular with have-a-go investors. But

A traditional consulting diagnostic of Boeing’s various priorities would, like nearly all its peers, reveal a fairly routine accounting of challenges centred almost entirely in governance and strategic management decisions (Report, May 18). Boeing and its competitors know how to build aircraft. But what they struggle with is whether they are a design and build,

Edward Luce wrote (“The world from Washington”, Life & Arts, May 14) that the 50th anniversary in February of Richard Nixon’s trip to China “passed in silence”. This is not entirely true. On February 17, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Europe Center (Bologna) organised a fascinating webinar entitled, “The week that

It is difficult to comprehend the world Michael Moritz inhabits regarding his position on the proposed online sales tax in the UK (“An online sales tax will be a further blight on the high street”, Opinion, May 16). Whether it is convenience, economy in the use of scarce time, lower prices (partly because of the

When a defecting South Korean maritime official tried to swim across the border in 2020, the North Korean navy shot him and burnt his body at sea for fear he was contaminated with coronavirus. Five months later, a group of Russian diplomats and their families were forced to propel themselves and their luggage across the

Pio Abad’s political art is almost in his blood. The child of activists during the dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines, he takes items of the Marcoses’ plunder — jewellery, silverware, Old Masters of tenuous provenance — and reworks them as postcards, drawings, augmented reality. It is a practice of history and

UK consumer confidence has dropped to its lowest level for nearly 50 years amid the cost of living crisis, according to a survey, fuelling concerns that the economy will slide into recession in 2022. The UK consumer confidence index fell 2 percentage points to minus 40 in May, its lowest since records began in 1974,