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In April, at least 70% of people in most parts of Latin America said they always wore masks when going out, compared with less than 30% across most of the U.S. and the U.K.

he region has also been home to some of the worlds’ longest lockdowns, although many weren’t strictly enforced

Over half of Latin Americans work in the informal sector, often with little or no savings, meaning that they had no choice but to go out to earn a living. Densely packed urban areas and multigenerational households also allowed the disease to spread more easily.

uropean gas prices have soared in recent weeks, climbing to a high of $25 per million British thermal units (chart 1, left panel)

from Russian supply bottlenecks to a lack of wind in the North Sea, caused the spike.

Even before the recent price surge, gas was in short supply. A prolonged northern-hemisphere winter meant that European countries ran down reserves, leaving their stocks 25% below the historic average

it is hard to imagine China could ever run short of this familiar fuel. But in recent months, the black pyramids have been not quite immense enough. A scarcity of coal, which accounts for almost two-thirds of China’s electricity generation, has contributed to the worst power cuts in a decade

The Chinese economy has been hit by a triple shock, stemming not only from the power cuts but also the pandemic and a property slowdown exacerbated by the financial woes of Evergrande, a developer.

the economy’s pace of growth slowed to 4.9% in the third quarter,

Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said the U.S. economy is facing unprecedented risks that have him preparing for dramatic upheavals.

Consumers and businesses are flush with cash, wages are rising and the economy is growing rapidly after its pandemic slowdown. While consumer confidence has declined, Mr. Dimon says the more important gauge is booming spending.

Yet Mr. Dimon warned that the war in Ukraine could collide with rising inflation to slow the pandemic recovery and alter global alliances for decades to come.

On Wednesday, the Spanish Health Ministry reported that the 14-day incidence rate had fallen 20 points to 3,286 per 100,000. This is the second day in a row that this data point has dropped after two months on the rise.

What’s more, while hospitals remain under strain, the situation is far from what it was during other waves.

In response to the surge in coronavirus infections in the leadup to Christmas, the Spanish government announced on December 23 that face masks would once again be mandatory outdoors. At the time, Darias said this measure would be in place “until the epidemiological situation improved.”

On March 10, Twitter users in Russia suddenly experienced a sharp slowdown in the service.

Russian authorities wanted Twitter to remove more than 3,000 “illegal” posts, which human rights groups saw as an effort to stifle dissent.

When Twitter did not comply, the government was ready. It deployed a new technology so it could do the job itself.

As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks

China’s boom was underpinned by unusually high levels of domestic investment in infrastructure and other hard assets, which accounted for about 44% of GDP each year on average between 2008 and 2021. That compared with a global average of 25% and around 20% in the U.S., according to World Bank data.

Such heavy spending was made possible in part by a system of “financial repression” in which state banks set deposit rates low, which meant they could raise funds inexpensively and fund building projects. China added tens of thousands of miles of highways, hundreds of airports, and the world’s largest network of high-speed trains.

About one-fifth of apartments in urban China, or at least 130 million units, were estimated to be unoccupied in 2018,

the trend of rising emigration actually predates the pandemic—and coincides with the emergence of several other important economic trends since 2017, including higher youth unemployment, the state’s renewed grip on the financial sector and an apparently structural downtrend in Chinese growth.

Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.

China, unlike the U.S., has always been a nation of emigrants—its diaspora is among the world’s largest and most influential.

The timing of this Japan obsession was impeccable: It came at almost the exact moment Japan’s remarkable rise turned into a sustained decline in economic power. Here’s the ratio of Japan’s gross domestic product to America’s, adjusted for differences in purchasing power:

China has seemed to be faltering lately, and some have been asking whether China’s future path might resemble that of Japan.

My answer is that it probably won’t — that China will do worse. But to understand why I say that, you need to know something about what happened to Japan, which wasn’t at all the catastrophe I think many people imagine.

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

I’m convinced that the ability to get good, if not great, care in facilities that aren’t competing with one another is the main way that other countries obtain great outcomes for much less money. It also allows for more regulation and control to keep a lid on prices.

Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market.

Other social determinants that matter include food security, access to education and even race. As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.

Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal

the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.

On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much more like a national flatlining.

interest-rate rises have now returned mortgage rates to levels not seen for decades. A year ago the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in America was below 3%. Today it is only a little shy of 7%

Three factors will determine where the pain is most acute, and thus where these consequences are most likely. The first is recent price growth. Housing markets where prices have surged since the pandemic are especially vulnerable to cooling demand

Borrowing levels are the second factor. The higher household debt is as a share of income, the more vulnerable owners are to higher mortgage payments and defaults.

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

In both cases, heavy federal spending (on the war in Vietnam and Great Society programs in the 1960s, on the response to Covid in 2020 and 2021) added to demand. And shocks to global energy and food prices in the 1970s made the inflation problem significantly worse, just as they are doing now.

In contrast, efforts by the current Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and his colleagues to bring down inflation enjoy considerable support from both the White House and Congress, at least so far. As a result, the Fed today has the independence it needs to make policy decisions based solely on the economic data and in the longer-run interests of the economy, not on short-term political considerations.

a key difference from the ’60s and ’70s is that the Fed’s views on both the sources of inflation and its own responsibility to control the pace of price increases have changed markedly. Burns, who presided over most of the 1970s inflation, had a cost-push theory of inflation. He believed that inflation was caused primarily by large companies and trade unions, which used their market power to push up prices and wages even in a slow economy. He thought the Fed had little ability to counteract these forces, and as an alternative to raising interest rates, he helped persuade Nixon to set wage and price controls in 1971, which proved a spectacular failure.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.

The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.

Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments.