Opinion

Singapore offers a small ray of light in a faltering global economy. The country that’s so intimately tied to the rhythms of global commerce dodged a recession in the third quarter, figures Monday showed. Singapore simultaneously eased monetary policy, the first such step since 2016, as anticipated. That it did so cautiously suggests at least some of the doom and ...

Ursula von der Leyen is off to a bad start. The incoming president of the European Commission and her cabinet were supposed to begin working November 1. Instead, the commission will be lucky if it gets sworn in by Christmas. Even then, it may already be damaged goods. The whole process serves as an unsubtle metaphor for a union that ...

Canadians may find the choices in their October 21 national election disheartening. Though there are six candidates, it is essentially a contest between Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party incumbent prime minister who was shamed over the blackface photos of his youth, and the Conservative Party challenger Andrew Scheer, who has been outed as an American citizen. Such a perspective is ...

Blacklisting by the US government, accusations of espionage and the arrest of its chief financial officer haven’t been enough to scare investors away from Huawei Technologies Co. Shares of China’s biggest telecoms equipment and smartphone maker aren’t publicly listed, making its equity largely unavailable to outsiders. Its bonds, however, do trade and have continued their upward trajectory over the past ...

With the unemployment rate at a 50-year low, the hope is that the US consumer will more than offset an otherwise faltering economy. Don’t bet on it. Clearly, the broad economy is not only weak, but weakening. The yield curve has inverted, with 10-year Treasury note yields falling below two-year yields. Every time that’s happened in the post-war era, a ...

We’ve seen this movie before. The top economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — the global agency created after World War II to promote stability and growth in the world economy — unveil their latest forecast, which is almost always weaker than its previous forecast. The economists hold out the possibility that world growth will improve if the most ...

Japan’s biggest airline is betting that the future of travel isn’t traveling at all. For the last month, a married couple in Oita Prefecture has been interacting with a robot — called an Avatar — that’s controlled by their daughter hundreds of miles away in Tokyo. Made by ANA Holdings Inc., it looks like a vacuum cleaner with an iPad ...

Being an enormously profitable industry leader doesn’t mean what it used to. Johnson & Johnson and UnitedHealthGroup Inc., the world’s biggest health-care company and health insurer, respectively, reported third-quarter earnings results that should thrill investors. Both managed to beat Wall Street earnings estimates and boosted full-year profit guidance above expectations as they generated a combined $80 billion in sales. You’d ...

After eight difficult years doing whatever it took to support Europe’s economies, Mario Draghi is about to step down as the president of the European Central Bank (ECB). In taking up this challenge, his successor, Christine Lagarde, faces the same underlying problem: The currency union at the center of the European project is unfinished work. From the beginning, the euro ...

Much of the commentary about Michael Kremer, named as one of three winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has justifiably celebrated his pioneering work in studying poverty — even now, many of us believe, the planet’s greatest moral challenge. But an important 2011 Kremer paper, overlooked in the celebration, helps to shed light on another great challenge ...