Opinion

Heading into the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision this week, the consensus is that the central bank will cut its lending benchmark for the third time in as many meetings. But, unlike the past two, there’s belief that Chair Jerome Powell will strongly suggest a timeout on monetary easing this time around. Perhaps the strongest case for this conviction is the ...

SoftBank Group Corp.’s $9.5 billion bailout has rescued WeWork from the threat of bankruptcy. But make no mistake: The unicorn’s free-spending days are over. Its saviour is far from a bottomless pit of money. While WeWork had an eye-watering $22bn of debt at the end of June plus $47bn of looming lease-payment obligations, its rescuer, Softbank, isn’t in such great ...

The world’s most important gold market isn’t what it used to be. Just a decade ago, India’s hunger for gold jewellery and bullion meant it accounted for about a quarter of global demand. Consumption has since fallen by about 24%. Carat and Stick Part of this is a reaction to short-term pricing factors. Buyers tend to stay away when the ...

With so much bad news in the world these days, it was invigorating to spend last weekend in Yerevan, Armenia celebrating some courageous human-rights activists who reminded me of what’s best in the human spirit. The event was this year’s awards ceremony of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. The group was founded several years ago by three Armenians who ...

Nokia Oyj only really has two competitors in the telecoms equipment business, and one of them — China’s Huawei Technologies Co. — has been all but banned from much of the market. At the same time, phone companies are opening their checkbooks for a new generation of 5G technology that’s only supplied by Nokia, Huawei and the other big rival, ...

A charismatic entrepreneur who prioritised growth over profitability, ran up a massive rent bill and then stepped aside when it looked like the company might run out of cash. No, not WeWork Cos Inc.; I’m talking about Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA. On October 24, the hip transatlantic airline, loved by bargain-hunting American millennials, announced the first fruits of its turnaround ...

Before our eyes, nature is vanishing faster than we might have imagined. The bird population in the US has fallen by more than 30% in the past 40 years, as have insect populations in Germany. In the UK, 60% of mammals and birds have disappeared since 1970. Meanwhile, nearly one-third of marine mammals worldwide face extinction. The problem seems especially ...

From the Rocky Mountains to the Rhineland and Australia’s Great Dividing Range, the great tide of the coal industry is receding. The entire Powder River Basin, the region spanning the states of Montana and Wyoming that provides about half of America’s thermal coal, is “distressed,” Moody’s Investors Service wrote in a report last week. All companies producing coal there are ...

No matter how the UK’s tortuous process of leaving the European Union (EU) ends, those who supported Brexit as a way of curbing immigration will have to accept the immutable mathematics of demographics: Britain will remain economically reliant on foreign workers for decades to come. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just published its latest projections for the size ...

The top-line takeaway from a BNY Mellon Investment Management national survey on fixed-income investing was stunning: A measly 8% of Americans were able to accurately define fixed-income investments. The 29-question online survey of just more than 2,000 adults, conducted in July, clearly shows that many Americans admit to having little knowledge about various fixed-income markets and how to invest in ...