Opinion

Brexit is driving up prices and there’s an election around the corner, but Britons are still hitting the shops, to judge by a raft of reports from retailers. Marks & Spencer Group Plc said that while its same-store clothing and home-furnishing sales fell more than estimated in the three months through April 1, full-price sales were up, and there are …

Sitting in my Hangzhou hotel room one evening last September, I caught a helpfully subtitled Chinese TV show about Song Dynasty inscriptions carved on a mountainside near Quanzhou — the city Chinese media invariably call “the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.” With prayers for good winds and safe returns, the carvings bore witness to China’s far-flung commercial relations …

By the time Georgia’s 6th District votes in the June 20 special congressional election, $40 million — perhaps more than $130 per ballot — will have been spent to pick one-435th of one-half of one of the three branches of one of America’s governments. This is an expensive funeral for Tip O’Neill’s incessantly quoted and increasingly inapplicable axiom that “All …

In the match for India’s financial services future, fintech just scored twice while banks are still struggling to retrieve the ball they scuffed into their own net. It’s just the start of what looks like a bruising battle for traditional lenders. India’s banks, which still dominate the country’s financial landscape, appear to have hardly a kick left in them. Stressed …

Canada’s housing market offers a case study in a contentious economic issue: If a central bank sees a bubble forming, should it act to deflate it? In this instance, the answer should be a resounding yes. A combination of foreign money, local speculation and abundant credit has driven Canadian house prices to levels that even government officials recognize cannot be …

People have been discussing how Donald Trump interacts with other humans, guessing at the extent to which he is capable of anticipating or understanding how they think. Some believe he has no such “theory of mind.” I disagree: He has one, but it’s path-independent. Remember when he thought people would like the fact that he’d fired FBI Director James Comey? …

China’s financial markets are fascinating to watch these days. Efforts by officials to decrease the nation’s enormous debt pile without destabilizing domestic markets are having profound consequences, most visibly in the bond market, where the yields on short-term debt have risen above those on longer maturities for the first time. The implications are more than just academic. In fact, they …

In one of the most important rulings in its history, the European Court of Justice gave the European Commission broad powers to negotiate trade deals without the approval of each member state. This is likely to make Brexit negotiations much easier than expected, but the final deal — if there is one — worse for the U.K. Formally, the ruling …

When we think about productivity, we often have a bias towards physical goods — things we can touch and feel, like iPhones or suits. But over the past century, as the economic historian Stephen Broadberry has shown, services, not manufacturing, have been key to explaining which countries are moving up or down the international productivity league table. And yet advanced …

Center-left parties throughout the Western world have been tempted to pick dogmatic, hard-left leaders. In Europe, one after another party has succumbed to the temptation, though it has hurt their electoral chances. It seems illogical, but it may eventually pay off. The Spanish Socialists, the party that has been in government most since the country democratized, has just returned Pedro …