Opinion

As the global economy shows signs of stuttering, the race is on to find the right policy response. In Europe, many central bankers are asking politicians in countries such as Germany to unleash a fiscal stimulus to complement their recent monetary push. In the US, President Donald Trump is lambasting the Federal Reserve for failing to cut rates fast enough, ...

All over the world, truth is in trouble. What are we going to do about that? Unfortunately, Facebook’s new policy on political advertisements is a step in the wrong direction. By exempting “politicians” from its third-party fact-checking program, designed to reduce the spread of lies and falsehoods in ads, the company is essentially throwing up its hands. With some urgency, ...

That was quick. Workers in Hong Kong’s finance industry returned to the office after a long weekend of violent protests to find that their stock exchange has decided not to pursue a takeover bid for its London counterpart. The limp end to its month-long courtship has left Charles Li, chief executive officer of Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd., looking ...

The Federal Reserve held a “listening session” in Washington, not for members of Congress but for representatives from the community. It was a worthwhile exercise and is an admirable program, but as it turns out their main concerns are beyond the Fed’s ability to address. Representatives of traditionally price-conscious groups such as retirees and small-business owners reported that they were ...

Political leaders around the globe have celebrated the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg – but can they handle her as she and her supporters turn more radical? The protests launched in big cities worldwide by the environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion are a first test. Extinction Rebellion, like Thunberg, wants governments to treat climate change as an emergency and to ...

HSBC Holdings Plc’s interim Chief Executive Officer Noel Quinn is considering going much further than his former boss in cutting fat at the bank. He may triple job reductions announced just two months ago to as much as 6% of the workforce. Sure enough, Quinn may be trying to impress the board and investors to secure the No. 1 position ...

The judge took 130 pages to explain that Harvard’s “holistic review” admissions policies — which include ascribing particular attributes to certain ethnicities, such as Asian Americans, and assessing the value to Harvard of those attributes — are, considering 41 years of Supreme Court precedents, permissibly race-conscious. She said the policies do not discriminate against Asian Americans. However, the suit some ...

The news that President Trump is considering abandoning the Open Skies Treaty probably brought a yawn from most observers. Arms-control agreements like this seem to many people like yesterday’s problem. But ignoring arms control is a dangerous mistake, especially now. We’re in a moment of strategic instability between the United States and Russia, when the two nations barely talk. At ...

Thailand really should let its hair down. The currency is strong and the current-account surplus is big versus the neighbourhood, while there’s a lot of scope for fiscal expansion. The Bank of Thailand has been grudging in cutting interest rates, in contrast to the easing party under way not just in Asia but in emerging and developed markets the world ...

General Electric Co. employees are still paying the price for the company’s mistakes. The industrial conglomerate announced that it will freeze US pension benefits for approximately 20,000 salaried employees and supplemental payouts for 700 executives. They’ll get to keep the benefits they’ve already accrued, and a plan to prefund an additional $4 billion to $5 billion of those obligations helps ...