Samanth Subramanian

Of the $510 billion distributed by the US government as part of its paycheck protection program in 2020, more than 70% of it—or nearly $370 billion—went into the pockets of business owners and shareholders in the richest 20% of the population. A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) called the result “highly regressive,” but noted that the program improved its focus in 2021.

Cargo ships schlep thousands of millions of tons of cargo around the world every year

US inflation hit a 40-year-high in December, as new data showed the Consumer Price Index rose 7% year-on-year, a rate unmatched since 1982. The spike was driven by increases in the prices of shelter, used and new vehicles, gasoline, and other consumer goods such as household furnishings, food, and apparel.

Early in the covid-19 pandemic, Karex Berhad, the Malaysian company that makes one out of every five condoms sold worldwide, said it was bracing for double-digit growth in demand. The rationale was understandable: governments were asking people to work from home, after all, and no one wanted to have children during these uncertain times, Goh Miah Kiat, Karex’s chief executive, said in March 2020.

Social media operatives apparently affiliated to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) use a specialized app to hijack Twitter trends, harass critics, and spread propaganda through defunct WhatsApp accounts, according to a new investigation by The Wire, an Indian publication.

As bad as 2021 was for Evergrande, the Chinese real-estate giant floundering in debt, it was at least still around as the year drew to a close. By the end of 2022, Evergrande as we knew it may altogether cease to exist.

As a tornado neared an Amazon delivery station in Edwardsville, in western Illinois, drivers and other staff were told to head to the bathrooms, because the building lacked better basement shelters. One of at least six people who’ve been confirmed dead was in a bathroom when the tornado hit on the night of Dec. 10.

Anyone in doubt about the extent to which Amazon rules our lives—well beyond the things we buy—only needs to look at the spiraling effects of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Dec. 7, when everything from banking apps to home deliveries to Christmas lights suddenly blinked out.

The central banker’s job description demands a subtle sense of semantics: A stray word or misused phrase can move markets and rock economies. This holiday season, it appears, Jerome Powell, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, will spend his days musing over the meanings of the word “transitory.”

President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate is being buffeted by demonstrators, litigants, and Trump-era judges—all of whom doubtless put on their seat belts without giving it a second thought as they drove to their protest sites and courthouses.

After two cases of the omicron variant were detected in Canada on Sunday (Nov. 28), the writing is on the wall: omicron has, in all likelihood, already arrived in the US.

This story has been updated with news of WHO’s classification of the variant.

Frankincense and myrrh aren’t setting the commodities markets on fire, but gold is in high demand—as both Christmas gift and investment—for the second mid-pandemic holiday season in a row.

On the one hand, Saudi Arabia’s government and sovereign wealth fund are preparing to issue green bonds, to drum up investment for renewable energy and other sustainable projects. On the other, Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, plans to boost production of crude oil from 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels a day by 2027.

When and where the covid-19 pandemic began seems to hinge on when a 41-year-old accountant got sick.

Between 2015 and 2020, the wealth of the top 1% and that of the bottom 90% in the US were in near-parity; sometimes one metric stuck its head above the other, or vice versa. Then the covid-19 pandemic struck, and for a brief moment, when big banks and companies felt the hiccups and when regular Americans were receiving stimulus payments, the bottom 90% was out in front.

If Lael Brainard is named the new chair of the Federal Reserve this week, she won’t be fretting about raising interest rates to combat inflation any time soon. Expect a central bank under Brainard’s stewardship to be more proactive about other things, though: climate change, for instance, and digital currencies.

AstraZeneca is now looking for “modest profitability” on its covid-19 vaccines, shifting away from its commitment to provide vaccines at cost as long as the pandemic lasted.

Over the past decade, rich nations and private enterprises have raised at least $500 billion to help developing countries cope with climate change. This financing plan, hatched in 2009, was supposed to build to an annual mobilization of $100 billion by 2020, and was designed to offset the unfairness of climate change—of poor countries suffering because rich countries had already emitted their way to wealth.

In taking the free advice of 3.5 million people, the world’s richest man is inadvertently proving the wisdom of the Democrats’ proposed “billionaire tax.”

Even in 2020, a pandemic year—when planes sat on the ground, car travel seized up, ships stayed in their berths, and economic activity stalled everywhere—fossil fuel emissions fell by just 5.4%. And then, in 2021, they will rise again by a projected 4.9%, a “bigger than expected” rebound, according to researchers from the Global Carbon Project (GCP), which compiled the data.

In the ongoing boom in bitcoin, mining companies are scrambling to mint as much of the currency as they possibly can. But their enterprise is being hindered—by covid-19 and China’s crypto crackdown, but also by snarls in the global supply chain.

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On the eve of COP26, the leaders of the 20 biggest economies in the world pledged to stop financing new coal power plants overseas—a bid to drag down emissions from the dirtiest fossil fuel.