Opinion

Over the weekend, India’s Supreme Court pronounced on a title dispute in Ayodhya, a small town in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Like many other property cases in India, this one had been working its way through the judicial system for decades. But it may be the most consequential such dispute in Indian history. Millions of Hindus believe Ayodhya ...

European fund management companies spent 2018 watching their share prices steadily decline, battered by increased regulatory scrutiny, customers withdrawing money and the relentless squeezing of fees. They’ve rallied this year, but the industry’s biggest beast in the region is outpacing its peers by an astonishing margin. Investors in Amundi SA have enjoyed a total return of more than 60% in ...

It’s tough being a cryptocurrency exchange. All you want to do is provide a valuable liquidity service to an emerging industry, while navigating a fine line between regulatory compliance and crypto anarchy. But maybe you step a little too far into the shady side and find yourself in trouble. That could be the situation an exchange called Bitfinex finds itself ...

The torrent of astonishing talk from Democratic presidential aspirants has included two especially startling ideas. One is that we are going to die — the climate change crisis is “existential” — unless America does a slew of things that the aspirants know are not going to be done. And the leading progressive aspirant has endorsed an idea that would confirm ...

The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy — also known as CAP — is a 58-billion-euro system of farm aid that accounts for the bloc’s biggest single budget expense. And it has long been a punching bag for euroskeptics. The UK press for years excoriated the “butter mountains” supported by EU money. Even after production quotas went away, critics accused the ...

It’s a deal linking Shanghai and Zurich, but the real target looks to be London. China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co. is in talks to invest at least $2 billion in Swiss Re AG, Manuel Baigorri of Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Shanghai-based China Pacific is the country’s third-largest insurer, while Zurich-based Swiss Re is Switzerland’s biggest ...

The European Union’s 555 billion-euro ($600 billion) lending arm, the European Investment Bank, will choose this month whether to sign off on a plan to ditch fossil fuel projects almost entirely and boost support for clean-energy finance. The decision has been delayed by pushback from Germany and some central European nations. That says a lot about Berlin’s muddled approach to ...

As the UK prepares for elections on December 12, the outlook for Brexit is as unclear as ever. Among the options before voters are leaving the European Union without a deal (the Brexit Party); leaving with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s deal (the Tories); hammering out a new deal that would then be subject to a second referendum (Labour); or simply ...

Emmanuel Macron wants to “take back control” of immigration in France. At first glance, his government’s forthright language — and its aspirations for a system of numerical “quotas” similar to Canada’s or Australia’s — sounds a lot like the populist clarion call that won Nigel Farage the Brexit referendum. There are differences, of course. This is about migration from outside ...

Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank Group Corp., has joined the new religion for technology investing. Last week, Son disclosed SoftBank’s third-quarter investment losses from bets on WeWork, Uber Technologies Inc. and other stakes. He also talked about his fealty to corporate cash flow and putting appropriate guardrails on young companies. Son displayed something that seemed like humility — in ...