Opinion

And now for a major test of the well-oiled retailing machine that is Walmart Inc. The big-box giant announced that Greg Foran, the CEO of its US division — which makes up the bulk of its sales and operating income — is leaving to become CEO at Air New Zealand Ltd. He will be replaced by John Furner, who has ...

The finance community in the UK has a conflicted relationship with Libor, the reference interest rates for everything from mortgages to car loans to corporate debt. This makes it likely that the benchmarks will survive beyond their planned termination date. The current plan is for Libor to wink out of existence by the end of 2021. Changes in the wholesale ...

Attempts to accelerate the shakeup of German banking haven’t had much success in the past year. First, talks to combine two state-owned regional lenders fell apart; then Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG tried but (for good reason) were unable to find a way to make a merger work. Now a third combination is on the table. This time too, ...

If you want a snapshot of how far the euro zone has come, look no further than Greece and Italy. Until recently, the two Mediterranean countries have been considered the sick men of Europe, as investors demanded hefty premiums to hold their sovereign bonds. These extra charges were all the more striking given the steep fall in the yields of ...

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc.’s sales have withered in recent years for a variety of internal reasons, but it has also suffered because of punishing competition from Target Corp. Now the beleaguered home-goods chain will try to get some of that Target magic for itself. Bed Bath & Beyond announced its new CEO: Mark Tritton, chief merchandising officer at Target ...

How worried should we be about Starbucks’s recent announcement that it plans to begin testing a new type of store that only takes orders via mobile app — no cashiers? At first glance the image seems vaguely dystopian: person after person filing through, inevitably wearing AirPods, to pick up caffeine-and-sugar infusions they ordered by pressing a few buttons on their ...

No news can be good news sometimes. The logic of past Brexit negotiations suggests that the less we hear about what’s happening in intensive Brussels talks, the greater the chance that those talks are getting somewhere. Once the details start to leak and the anonymous briefings start, what’s left tends to be dead on arrival. Yet even with scant details ...

America’s second shale boom is running out of steam. But don’t panic just yet, a third one may be coming over the horizon. The US Energy Information Administration published its latest short-term energy outlook last week and has cut its forecast of oil production by the end of 2020 for the fourth straight month. It now expects American output to ...

During the past 12 months Renault SA has looked more like a soap opera than a carmaker. The French company served up an ill-tempered denouement when it sacked Chief Executive Officer Thierry Bollore, who said he was the victim of a “coup.” Bollore only took the job in January after his predecessor Carlos Ghosn was arrested for alleged impropriety around ...

Donald Trump isn’t the only leader with a sense of drama. The timing of China’s announcement that it will remove foreign ownership caps on financial services firms next year is no accident. It arrives as the climactic day of trade talks is about to get under way in Washington, and presents a challenge to the US president’s efforts to limit ...