Opinion

One of the controversies that swirls around the Federal Reserve — America’s central bank — is whether it could rescue the economy from collapse in the event of another financial crisis. Among economists, there are many skeptics, but Ben Bernanke, who was Fed chairman during the 2007-09 Great Recession, isn’t one of them. In a long and detailed paper, Bernanke ...

Give Macy’s Inc. a polite clap, and no more, for kicking off the retail holiday reporting season in reasonable style. The department store giant said that like-for-like sales from company-owned stores fell 0.7% in November and December, compared with the year earlier period. That’s by no means stellar, but it was much better than its dismal third quarter, when same-store ...

A perennial risk in the airline industry is that executives splash money on shiny new planes but fail to make an adequate return. Willie Walsh, the chief executive officer of International Consolidated Airlines Group, has tried to do things differently by — shock! — insisting that the British, Irish and Spanish airlines he oversees make decent money. (Created in 2011, ...

The start of a new year brings with it a raft of data on the world’s energy systems. So far, electricity sector figures show a transition well underway — some sources increasing, others collapsing. Each market is different, but the trends in markets as diverse as the UK, Spain, Australia and Texas all show profound changes in what is a ...

The Carlos Ghosn circus opened in Lebanon, with the ringmaster demanding rapt attention. Some 120 journalists from around the world, armed with cameras and cellphones, crammed in a room to hear Ghosn defend himself for the first time since he escaped from Japan last week. Ghosn, the former chairman of Nissan Motor Co. — and the creator of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi ...

CLSA Ltd. is losing its identity. That’s bad news for its parent’s ambitions to build a globally competitive Chinese investment bank in the mold of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citic Securities Co. is tightening control over CLSA following an exodus of employees and top executives from the Hong Kong-based brokerage last year, Cathy Chan of Bloomberg News reported, citing people ...

Flashback to mid-December. British voters had just delivered a decisive national election victory to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives with two full weekends left before Christmas. Expectations were high that shoppers, giddy at the prospect of an end to political gridlock and repetitive threats of hard Brexit, would rush to the stores to make up for lost time in their holiday preparations ...

If a real-life “Beetle Bailey” — the Mort Walker comic strip soldier who’s a perpetual grumbler and questioner of authority in the US military — were to mutter a cynical assessment of what’s happened in the days since the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, he might be tempted to call it “Operation Backfire.” The big shots, led by ...

In a world caught between bulls and bears, convertible bonds can please both camps. As coupon-paying securities, they provide income like a bond. But they turn into equity if an issuer’s stock rises by a set amount, so investors can taste some of the upside, too. In China, convertible bonds are by no means a compromise; they can offer mouth-watering ...

Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Soliris may be the most successful rare-disease medicine in history. Its approval in multiple conditions and an annual price tag that can exceed $500,000 propelled the drug to more than $3 billion in sales last year. Now, for the first time, it looks like Alexion’s blockbuster will face serious competition. Last week, Kentucky-based Apellis Pharmaceuticals Inc. published ...