Opinion

The inflow of migrants from North Africa has split Europe between those who think governments should do all they can to save human lives and those who fear rescue operations mainly benefit smugglers. A new study shows such concerns could be well-grounded. Giovanni Mastrobuoni, one of Europe’s preeminent economists of crime based at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, worked ...

Those who fear an impending cold war between the U.S. and China need only look to the bond market to see evidence of a potential thaw. In the midst of a holiday-shortened week for American markets, China easily sold a record $6 billion of dollar-denominated bonds, accumulating $20 billion of investor orders that allowed it to tighten yield spreads for ...

Google says it will limit the targeting of political ads to make it harder to sneak misinformation to impressionable voters. That puts the company ahead of the pack when it comes to making the political business of big internet platforms look less threatening. But the efficiency of political micro-targeting is questionable, and Google is responding to a moral panic rather ...

Europe’s steel industry is in crisis again and there’s no shortage of reasons for all the financial losses and job cuts. Stagnating demand, surplus production capacity, higher iron ore prices and a surge in imports caused by trade conflicts are just some of them. But when Tata Steel Ltd. announced 3,000 job losses at its European arm this week, the ...

America’s corporate economy has long been divided between a taxed, for-profit sector and a non-taxed, not-for-profit sector. This division has significant implications for tax policy: To wit, if the wealth gained from for-profits is penalised, the non-profit sector will also suffer. Consider the wealth taxes that have been proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Even an apparently modest annual ...

Novartis AG’s latest biotech bolt-on requires a big leap of faith. The Swiss drugmaker’s $9.7 billion deal to buy Medicines Co. pays the US cardiovascular specialist’s shareholders a huge chunk of the potential gains to be had from its novel treatment for lowering bad cholesterol. Investors will have to console themselves that Novartis is big enough to absorb the cost ...

London first banned Uber under its buccaneer of a founding chief executive officer, Travis Kalanick — and now for a second time under Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was meant to be the adult in the room. Though the ban won’t be a popular decision among Londoners and many will call it disproportionate, it shows Uber Technologies Inc. has more ...

The number of new international students at US universities fell for the fourth academic year in a row in 2018-2019. But only by a little bit (the new-student number was 0.9% lower than the previous year’s). These data, released by the Institute of International Education, shed a little more light on the question whether the policies and rhetoric of President ...

Australia is edging closer to needing a dose of extra stimulus if it’s to retain its status as the magical land where recessions don’t happen. That juice may take the form of quantitative easing — a once-unthinkable step for a country with a historical preference for budget surpluses and an economy that’s expanded continuously for 28 years. After four quarters ...

When it comes to shrinking the state’s role in production, the priorities of the Bharatiya Janata Party government that’s ruled India since 2014 are very different from those of its predecessor, which left power a decade earlier. And that’s something that has annoyed investors no end. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP prime minister between 1998 and 2004, gave a colleague ...