Opinion

Most developed countries grow at about the same rate, thanks to the broad march of technological progress and globalisation. But in each decade, there are a few stars that outperform the rest. Typically, other rich nations look to these winners for clues about how to raise their own growth rates. In the decade since the financial crisis, Germany, Singapore and ...

Strategists at Bank of America Corp. published a report that said “the Fed needs a bazooka of asset purchases.” However, they said, that’s unlikely to happen, and the central bank will probably buy only $25 billion to $50 billion a month in Treasury bills, “to guard against the perception of QE.” Well, the Federal Reserve brought the heavy artillery. The ...

But why? That’s the question I keep asking as Uber Technologies Inc. makes the case that driving people around cities gives it a leg up on moving physical goods from place to place — restaurant food, freight by truck and groceries. Uber expanded those efforts by agreeing to buy a majority of Cornershop, which helps supermarkets, pharmacies and food retailers ...

One word — “pathway” — is all it took to send the British pound rocketing against the US dollar. It had been a dire week in Brexit-land, with Boris Johnson’s do-or-die tactics failing to persuade the European Union (EU) to accept his new proposal on the Irish border. But suddenly came the surprising news that a meeting between the British ...

Big pieces of economic legislation tend to unleash the full power of unintended consequences. Consider Sarbanes-Oxley, the bipartisan law passed in 2002 in the wake of the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. It did what it was intended to do, which was ensure companies gave accurate accounts of their finances. But it has also led to debacles ...

Australia is still a continent, but it’s no longer an island. The country that was once immune to business cycles is being sucked deeper into the vortex of global monetary easing. That’s a measure of how pronounced and far-reaching the world economy’s downdraft has become. The Reserve Bank of Australia used to follow the US Federal Reserve in its monetary ...

For years governments have been discussing how to bring century-old international tax rules into line with modern business practices. A new proposal developed at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a think tank backed by industrial-country governments, is a big step forward. Under existing rules, multinationals have great leeway to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, with little regard ...

As Germany prepares to pass its climate protection plan through 2030, the government is trying to decide whether to prioritise solar or wind energy. The latest version of the plan leans towards solar, and that makes economic sense, but it also represents something of an unwelcome turnabout for the existing renewables industry, which is mostly wind-focused. In the most recent ...

The heated auction between buyout firm Bain Capital and Austria’s AMS AG for the German LED-maker Osram Licht AG has ended in no deal. The prospect of a transaction being rekindled in the near term looks bleak — though not impossible over the longer run. It beggars belief that a tense round of bidding can culminate in no more than ...

A common refrain you hear in India is, “There’s no credit in the market.” The despondence cuts across industries as diverse as real estate, autos and road construction. An 88% slump in the flow of funds to the commercial sector between April and September shows that the producers’ unease is justified. However, one credit tap is starting to gurgle, giving ...