Opinion

Japan Inc should rejoice at the prospect of a new premier: It can only get better from here. Yoshihide Suga, the top aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has been elected leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide, paving his way to the country’s top post. Parliament’s vote on Wednesday will make it official. For industrial Japan, ...

Sony Corp really didn’t need this. At a time when its collection of businesses, from movies to sensors, are all declining, the Japanese conglomerate had one bright spot on the horizon: a new games console. Now the company, and its investors, will need to wait a little longer for that fresh high. Sony has been forced to cut its own ...

As Covid-19 continues to stretch the UK’s public finances, with the deficit possibly approaching 20% of GDP this year, the autumn budget is expected to address the wide gap between tax revenues and spending. The impact is likely not just to be economic, but also political. Number Cruncher recently polled 1,000 British adults on the choices ahead. On the question ...

There’s no question that Germany has done relatively well during this annus horribilis, and that the administration of Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves most of the credit. But the country could soon have a different problem. The same government policies that worked so well in the first phase of the corona-recession could do major damage in the second phase and thereafter. ...

In the UK, Conservative party campaign ads often warn of “tax bombshells” about to be dropped by a profligate Labour party. Yet allies of Chancellor Rishi Sunak recently briefed the media about a Tory “tax bombshell” to pay for the billions splurged by the government during the Covid-19 crisis. An explosion duly followed in the ranks of his party. Sunak ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has a problem, and, no, it is not the exchange rate. The recent appreciation of the euro may have caught all the headlines, but it pales in comparison with the broader challenge the pandemic poses for monetary policy. Rather than simply talking down the currency, the ECB must take more substantive steps to support economic ...

Japan’s likely next prime minister is a huge fan of Shinzo Abe. That doesn’t mean Yoshihide Suga is a carbon copy. Indeed, the shades of difference between the two men on some key issues are important, particularly when the economy in question is the world’s third-largest, a critical part of global manufacturing and trade, and a pioneer of ultra-low interest ...

What would a second presidential term for Donald Trump look like, anyway? Let’s suppose he wins in November, and let’s assume the election winds up a lot like 2016. This time, he’s even farther behind in the polls before Election Day, but has a well-timed surge as November 3 approaches. And while he falls well short in the popular vote, ...

As many as 3 million migratory and seasonal labourers work on American farms. By one count, more than 100,000 of them have now been infected by the coronavirus. Yet the federal government has made no effort to test, trace or even document these cases. Instead, state and local officials have once again been asked to manage a pandemic that flows ...

Mukesh Ambani has joined the league of world’s richest with the help of a simple formula: assembling admirers for $2 businesses. First he got Facebook Inc and Google to back his fledgling digital ambitions, and now he may be trying to entice Amazon.com Inc into his retail venture, already India’s largest. In four years, the Indian billionaire has amassed roughly ...