Opinion

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was travelling in California on March 30 when he received a 4 am phone call from President Trump. The president demanded that the Navy release from the brig a SEAL named Eddie Gallagher, who was awaiting trial for allegedly murdering an IS detainee in Iraq in 2017. “Get him out!” Trump told Spencer, who was visiting ...

Now that Germany has dodged a recession, political decisions on fiscal stimulus have been postponed. Yet the country’s employers and labor unions are still demanding an infrastructure investment program worth at least 450 billion euros over 10 years, not to give an immediate boost to growth but to keep the country competitive in the future. The World Economic Forum (WEF) ...

In a rare bout of introspection, the European Central Bank has conceded that it’s partly to blame for creating the landscape that led to the misadventures in illiquidity that undid Neil Woodford and prompted investors to pull billions of dollars out of GAM Holding AG and H2O Asset Management. It’s right to be worried about asset managers stocking up on ...

After its $11.2 billion Hong Kong share sale, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will be sitting on $43 billion in cash. That sounds like a great problem to have. Only one publicly listed, non-financial company has more: Apple Inc., at $49 billion. Then you realise that management literally has more money than it knows what to do with. Sitting on the ...

If you see a flowering of “palm-oil free” labels on supermarket shelves next year, then thank Indonesian drivers, President Donald Trump’s trade negotiators, and sickly pigs in China. Palm oil — the red, semi-solid fat used in everything from noodles and soap to pastry and lipstick — has rarely been less attractive to consumer-product manufacturers. That isn’t so much a ...

When the European Union’s MiFID II financial rule-book was rolled out in 2018, asset management veteran Martin Gilbert warned of the unintended consequences for the bankers and brokers supplying trading services and investment research to his industry. With fund managers suddenly forced to budget and pay for investment research ideas separately from their actual trades, it seemed inevitable that overall ...

India is trying something new. After watching the shadow banking industry collapse in slow motion for more than a year, authorities have decided that enough is enough. They want to experiment with in-court bankruptcy for nonbank lenders. But will going to a haircut salon leave the financial system any neater? Dewan Housing Finance Corp. will be the test case of ...

To understand what’s so very odd about this British election campaign, it’s worth recalling where we were a month ago in the Brexit saga. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had returned from Brussels triumphant with a new withdrawal deal. All he needed was Parliament to give its okay — the same Parliament that had rejected his predecessor Theresa May’s deal three ...

Germany has long stood accused of being the main obstacle on the road to complete Europe’s monetary union. Yet, after a constructive proposal from Finance Minister Olaf Scholz over the creation of some form of joint deposit insurance, it is hard to treat Berlin as the grudger-in-chief of the euro region. In fact, Italy could soon become a bigger hurdle ...

The racketeering lawsuit brought by General Motors Co. against cross-town rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV is a legal bombshell for the US car industry. GM’s broadside lays out in forensic detail how Fiat allegedly conspired over many years to funnel payments to United Auto Workers’ officials, corrupt the collective bargaining process on wages and thus secure a competitive advantage. In ...