Opinion

Now only 15 flags in the Foreign Ministry’s foyer represent the nations that have not yet succumbed to Beijing’s financial blandishments — targeted at governments and individual politicians — and other pressures to sever diplomatic relations with this island nation. There were 17 flags a few weeks ago. The last time many Americans thought of the Solomon Islands (population 650,000) ...

On climate change, leaders have a tendency to make lofty long-term promises but take only baby steps to reach them. At the United Nations climate summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave an interesting explanation for why: They believe technology eventually will pick up the slack. This represents an ideological divide with environmental advocates, who don’t put much stock in the ...

EBay Inc. has been a resilient internet pioneer and also a confounding one. Now a new leader will have to solve the riddle. The company announced that Devin Wenig, the chief executive officer since 2015, had stepped down. The company’s chief financial officer, a longtime EBay employee, was named interim CEO while the company hunts for a permanent successor. Ebay ...

Mark Zuckerberg’scryptocurrency project, Libra, has become the regulatory equivalent of a pinata: Everyone is lining up to hit it with a stick. France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire calls it an assault on sovereignty and a risk to financial stability, an attack backed up by his German counterpart Olaf Scholz who dubbed it a “parallel currency.” You can see their ...

Nobody could expect sophistication from an event titled “Howdy, Modi!” And the Indian prime minister’s rally in Houston — attended by 50,000 or so screaming Indian Americans, two dozen US congressmen and senators, and President Donald Trump — was every bit as cheesy as its title. In his five-plus years in power, Modi has made a habit of addressing stadiums ...

Massive infrastructure projects are almost always delivered late and over budget. The bill for London’s Crossrail project has risen to 17.6 billion pounds ($21.9 billion), while the country’s north-south HS2 rail link may end up costing an unfathomable 88 billion pounds. Even so, there’s a place in budgetary hell reserved for new nuclear power plants, for whom financial commitments and ...

From ATMs to credit cards and PayPal, the West’s dominance of innovation in consumer finance appears to have exhausted itself. At the top of the emergent new order is the fintech duo from China — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Next in line are Alphabet Inc. and Walmart Inc., whose highly localized smartphone payment rivalry is playing ...

Up through the 1980s, the blessings of the Industrial Revolution seemed largely confined to a handful of countries in Western Europe, East Asia, the US, Australia and Canada. But in the past three decades, there has been a sea change, and developing countries have made great strides in catching up. Although inequality has risen within some nations, at the global ...

As the operation to fly home stranded Thomas Cook Group Plc passengers begins — and the blame game gets going over why the 178-year-old travel agent collapsed — another parallel process is underway: Seeing what can be salvaged from the ruins. Even before the company entered liquidation, there was never going to be much left for shareholders. They would probably ...

Global meat consumption has more than doubled since the 1960s, and meat production is set to double again by 2050. In one way, that’s a good thing — proof that rising incomes are supporting higher living standards in developing countries. But Americans, famous for enjoying too much of a good thing, still eat three times as much meat as the ...