Opinion

After a decade of gloom, there’s a new sense of euphoria in Athens. The Greek stock exchange is on course to be the world’s best performer this year because investors believe the new prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, will deliver on his promise to attract foreign investment and boost growth. The star performers are bank shares, which have nearly doubled in ...

For every 100 people in India, there are only three credit cards. A comparable penetration figure for the US is 320. Statistics like these suggest that India’s first initial public offering of a credit card issuer is either an opportunity with boundless prospects — or a victim of arrested development. Which is it? The sale of shares in SBI Cards ...

Christian Sewing has tried to cast an optimistic light on Deutsche Bank AG’s future as he undertakes the lender’s deepest restructuring in decades. The chief executive officer told staff he’d been looking forward to updating the market on his progress five months into the overhaul. The disclosures from that update, at the bank’s investor day, are more sobering: The skeptics ...

As recently as March, Daimler, the German carmaker, promised to put 10,000 autonomous taxis on the streets by 2021. But, Daimler chairman Ola Kaellenius announced that the company was taking a “reality check” on the project and focusing on self-driving long-haul trucks instead. It’s fine that self-driving cabs aren’t coming as fast as some expected — and it’s even better ...

Being in the midst of a presidential campaign, it’s not surprising that we’re bombarded with proposals for massive new government programs that promise to transform major segments of American life. We’re going to overhaul the health care system with “Medicare for All” or something like it; or we’re going to make college “free” by eliminating tuitions at state schools; or ...

Euro zone finance minsters’ are pushing back against the negative rate regime of the European Central Bank (ECB) just as Christine Lagarde takes the reins from Mario Draghi. This is yet another rerun of the battle between the economically strongest (essentially northern) European nations and their weaker partners over who should shoulder the burden for maintaining stability in the euro ...

China’s small bank problem may be about to get a lot bigger. The slowing economy is exposing vulnerabilities built up by years of aggressive lending — and Beijing’s plans to preserve stability by merging weak lenders with each other could end up creating an even worse headache. The country’s hundreds of rural commercial and city lenders account for 27% of ...

A German political crisis isn’t a raging, unstoppable, unpredictable forest fire: It starts with seemingly irreconcilable positions but then evolves into a tedious, detail-focused negotiation and, more often than not, a compromise. That’s the direction things appear to be taking after the election of two determined leftists as co-leaders of the Social Democratic party (SPD), the junior member of Germany’s ...

The rise of populist politicians across the rich world has led to a profound rethinking of the way developed economies work. In particular, the impact of automation on the labour market, and the disappearance of routine manufacturing jobs, has been blamed for the electoral successes of leaders such as US President Donald Trump and Italy’s Matteo Salvini. Yet there are ...

Given the proximity to the effective lower bound for interest rates, the Federal Reserve is looking to bolster its policy arsenal ahead of the next recession. Watch for the “bond traders’ nightmare” of adding yield curve control to the Fed’s toolkit to rise to the top of the list as the policy review draws closer to an end. Policy makers ...