Opinion

Last month, comedian John Oliver delivered a scathing episode on tech monopolies for his show “Last Week Tonight.” Between jokes, he laid out some key Big Tech antitrust concerns. Apple Inc controlling the App Store. Alphabet Inc’s Google favouring its own properties in search results. Amazon.com Inc reportedly using third-party seller data to create knock-off private label products. However, a ...

  Whatever else killed George Washington, the draining of more than a third of his blood in less than half a day would probably have done him in anyway. Well into the 19th century, bloodletting, as it was called, was the favoured treatment of doctors for pretty much everything for two reasons: First, it was based on a generally accepted ...

  Global economy watchers and market participants will be paying a lot of attention next week to how the Federal Reserve describes the US economic outlook, to the magnitude of its interest rate increase and whether it changes the pace of its balance-sheet contraction. Yet for the well-being of the US and global economy, the answer to these questions is ...

The smell of natural gas rarely gets thought of as a recession risk in Europe. Yet International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers listed exactly that as one of several potential bottlenecks that could aggravate the pain of a major European Union gas supply crisis, as seemingly small differences in the practice of gas odorisation for safety reasons would slow the flow ...

Here’s a scenario. You buy a pre-construction apartment and start paying the mortgage before it’s complete. The developer halts the project, has defaulted on its debt and it looks like the property may never get built. You hear of buyers elsewhere who have stopped making their loan payments; the government has stepped in to ensure the builders have money and ...

  Currency values fluctuate all the time, but some changes leave a lasting impression on the banking industry. In the Bretton Woods-era of fixed exchange rates, the 1967 devaluation of the British pound was one such seminal event. It made demand for dollars explode in Asia. Out of that craze, Dick van Oenen, an enterprising Dutch currency trader at Bank ...

  Thursday was expected to bring the spotlight to Europe, and what could be a historically consequential meeting on monetary policy by the European Central Bank (ECB). It’s going to raise rates. But there is now some question over how much — 25 or 50 basis points? And the constraints have never looked tighter. We all know that the world ...

As a former military commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), I do a lot of speaking in the US and internationally about the war in Ukraine. The question I get asked most frequently is terrifying and simple: “Would Vladimir Putin use a nuke?” Fortunately, I think the odds of the Russian president doing so are extremely low. But ...

Netflix Inc has shown an uncanny ability in the past to bounce back from an unexpectedly poor showing in one quarter with a better-than-projected result the next time around. And so it was on July 19: After alarming the market with its estimate in April of a drop of 2 million subscribers for the second quarter, the video streaming giant ...

  For a few decades now, China has been converging with the US economically. Depending how you measure it, its gross domestic product has either already passed that of its great global rival or is getting ever closer. Average incomes are still much lower in China, but by another key metric of living standards, life expectancy, China matched the US ...