Adam Schefter and the Global Gladiator Economy By Dave’s Locker International Desk On any given Tuesday, while most of the planet is busy filing taxes or dodging drones, 8.7 million people—an audience roughly the size of Switzerland—stop everything to watch a 57-year-old man in a tailored suit read text messages aloud. That man is Adam…
Hong Kong vs Sri Lanka: A Tale of Two Meltdowns, or How to Lose a Country in Three Easy Decades By Our Correspondent Who Has Luggage Tags on His Soul It is the best of times—if you’re a sovereign-bond vulture circling Colombo’s airport—and the worst of times—if you’re a Hong Kong bookseller who just realized…
Walmart Stock Surges, Planet Slightly Winces By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS—While European ministers argue over olive-oil subsidies and Chinese brokers refresh their screens for the next Evergrande shoe to drop, America’s favorite fluorescent temple to bulk mayonnaise has quietly ascended to new stock-price altitudes. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) closed Friday at an all-time…
The Continent That Refuses to Be a Soundbite By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Doubt Nairobi–Africa, that sprawling ellipsis of 54 nations and 1.4 billion plot twists, is once again the world’s favorite Rorschach test. Peer at it from Davos and you see the green future—lithium brine and cobalt seams humming beneath solar farms…
**The World Holds Its Breath While Washington Plays Interest Rate Roulette** As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell emerges from the marble temple of American monetary policy this week, global markets will be watching with the same nervous anticipation usually reserved for North Korean missile launches or Elon Musk’s Twitter feed. The September Fed meeting—essentially the…
The Fed Waves a Red Flag and Calls It a Victory Parade By Helena de la Cruz, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Washington, D.C. – If you listen very carefully at 2 a.m. in Singapore, you can almost hear the champagne corks popping inside the Eccles Building. The Federal Reserve has, at long last, delivered the…
**The Shiba Inu That Ate the World: How a Joke Currency Became the Perfect Mirror for Our Global Psychosis** In the pantheon of human achievements that future civilizations will struggle to explain—right alongside the Tulip Mania, the Pet Rock, and TikTok—Dogecoin stands as perhaps our most honest confession that we’ve collectively lost the plot. What…
Ocado’s Share Price: A Canary in the Global Panic Room International correspondents like to pretend their beat is the fate of nations. In truth, we spend most of our time watching spreadsheets dressed up as destiny. Take Ocado Group, the British online grocer turned warehouse-robot evangelist. Its share price has become less a financial metric…
**The Great British Clear-Out: How Sainsbury’s Argos Sale Became a Global Metaphor for Our Declining Civilization** *From our international desk, where we watch the world burn one clearance rack at a time* LONDON—While the BBC breathlessly covers cabinet reshuffles and the Guardian agonizes over Brexit’s latest plot twist, Britain’s retail bellwether has delivered what might…
The Global Hustle of Renting a Set of Wheels By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently hiding the fuel receipt from accounting In the beginning there was the wheel, and it was good. Then someone invented the surcharge, and the wheel required collision coverage, a credit-card imprint, and a 45-minute queue at Antalya Airport. Welcome, weary traveler,…
Storm Clouds with First-Class Frequent-Flyer Status A Dispatch from Everywhere and Nowhere in Particular By the time you read this, the storm has already checked two more time zones off its bucket list. Born somewhere over the mid-Atlantic—possibly above a rusting Portuguese trawler that long ago gave up pretending to fish—the cyclone now carries diplomatic…
In the grand geopolitical casino, few chips are traded faster than a 22-year-old American who can run 40 yards in 4.49 seconds and still remember the quadratic formula. Enter Jordan Addison, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ newest wide receiver, whose off-season transfer from Minnesota to Pennsylvania has apparently altered the balance of power in a world currently…
