Opinion

US President Donald Trump is known to admire his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That doesn’t mean, however, that he should imitate some of Putin’s least effective policies – such as declaring war on European cheese. In the US, a 25% tariff on cheese imported from the European Union kicks in on October 18. In 2014, Russia banned EU cheese, and ...

It’s been a decade since the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and yet here we are in a world where the highest government bond yield starts with the number “2.” Among the world’s major developed economies, only the English speaking countries – the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – still have monetary policy rates above zero. ...

A troubled British consumer brand with an illustrious past. Too much debt. A big Chinese investor. Sound familiar? Pizza Express Ltd., which is preparing for debt talks with creditors, is being compared to Thomas Cook Group Plc, the travel operator that collapsed last month. The 54-year-old restaurant chain isn’t in as precarious a state as Thomas Cook was for much ...

The contagion risk from India’s year-old shadow banking crisis has suddenly turned much graver. What investors don’t know yet is whether the new problem is a $4 billion headache, a $16 billion migraine, or a life-threatening tumor. On October 9, the Reserve Bank of India quashed a proposed merger of Indiabulls Housing Finance Ltd., one of the country’s largest real-estate ...

New US tariffs on as much as $7.5 billion of exports from the European Union (EU) have brought another reminder of how trade wars and protectionism dominate the news. Yet in the last two years, countries accounting for more than one-third of global output have signed more than a dozen trade treaties. When historians look back, they may depict this ...

More than anything else, last week’s market gyrations illustrated the tug of war that has dominated US stocks in recent months and confined them in a range despite significant developments in the underlying dynamics. The intensifying tension between the two macro forces could lead to greater volatility and pose increasing challenges for investors. The first part of the week was ...

Fund managers are grappling with how to incorporate environmental, social and governance considerations into their portfolios. A movement that started in equities has spread across asset classes. For credit investors, the trick to investing with a conscience without hurting returns may lie with which corporate bonds they load up on as much as with those they choose to shun. Chris ...

Cash is king, unless you are in Japan. One successful trading strategy there has recently lost its luster, thanks to the Bank of Japan’s never-ending obsession with negative interest rates. When a global recession looms, investors tend to hug stocks that pay handsome dividends. Cash rewards also have appeal at corporate headquarters. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the S&P ...

Last week brought lots of bad news about the American economy. The stock market treated each new data point suggesting that activity was slowing down as bad news. And that, in itself, is bad news. Here’s why: Grim tidings for the economy aren’t necessarily so bad for investors, because they tend to lead to lower interest rates. That, in turn, ...

How much do you care about the scourge of plastic waste, and how much more might you pay for a bottled drink in order to reduce it? We may be about to find out. The cost of brand new polyethylene terephthalate, or virgin PET (the stuff used to make plastic containers and fibers for clothing), fell below the cost of ...