French President Emmanuel Macron’s fight with public-sector rail workers will show how serious he is about economic reform. Unions are promising two days of disruption each week unless the president abandons his plan to expose the network to a whiff of economic reality. Macron should stand his ground. A government-commissioned report published in February showed just how badly France’s rail ...

Trade tensions between the US and China have escalated to the point where each side has slapped tariffs on imports. The logical question is: What now? Although a deal between the two countries will be reached by the end of May, China is expected to announce policies that attempt to mitigate any economic downside resulting from the trade frictions. Those ...

The corporation is a societal construct; we give limited liability and other rights to the corporate form, but we expect something of corporations too. Private markets are the new public markets. That’s a thing that I say a lot, but here is a front-page The Wall Street Journal article about it: “At least $2.4 trillion was raised privately in the ...

Are you stressed out about the singularity? Living in fear of the day when computers decide that humans are no longer necessary? Not to worry, say some leading experts in artificial intelligence: Research in the field might have actually hit a wall. No doubt, AI is everywhere. Computers assess financial news, identify viruses and even act as physics theorists, analyzing ...

The fresh disclosures about the Cambridge Analytica affair are dismaying for Facebook Inc., and they were getting a lot of deserved attention last week. But what happened at the shadowy political consulting firm is largely about Facebook’s past. The company made other changes that highlighted how lax it is currently being in allowing access to information from the social network’s ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans. The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices—including Macs, iPhones, and iPads—work ...

Bloomberg Lyft Inc. is testing a subscription service in more than two dozen cites, hoping to lock in customers as competition with Uber Technologies Inc. heats up in the US. In recent weeks, the San Francisco-based company began experimenting with a variety of subscription packages, now available in 30 markets. Lyft President John Zimmer said he sees subscriptions as the ...

Bloomberg Alphabet Inc. is changing a closely watched measure of Google’s digital advertising business and adjusting how it accounts for some private stock holdings, a move that will make reported income more volatile. The main difference is in how Google discloses the performance of its Network business, which runs ads on thousands of third-party websites. This will no longer be ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said the trade spat picked by the US risks increasing the burden on central banks — as well as hurting the poor — by dimming global growth prospects. Protectionist sentiment has already “contributed to tighter financial conditions,” Coeure said at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy. “A ‘trade war’ scenario ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged for the fourth straight meeting and cut its inflation forecast citing lower food prices. Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel and his monetary policy committee retained the benchmark repurchase rate at 6 percent. The move was predicted by all 42 economists in a Bloomberg survey. Five of the six-member MPC voted ...