Opinion

As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sat at the United Nations in New York, his political strategy was collapsing at home. Last week, Britain’s Supreme Court shot down Johnson’s decision last month to suspend Parliament. It was an unequivocal rebuke: All 11 justices concurred that Johnson’s plan was “unlawful, void and of no effect” and rejected each of the government’s ...

After years of procrastination, Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has officially joined the Paris climate agreement, which it signed in 2016. It shows that President Vladimir Putin’s views of climate change are evolving and he wants his government to do more. Putin was never a fully-fledged climate change denier. Rather, he once didn’t take it seriously enough. Addressing ...

The maker of Aston Martin sports cars is buying what it calls an insurance policy against the risk it runs out of cash before the most critical product launch in its 106-year history. The terms of a new $250 million debt package show just how limited the UK company’s options for securing funds are as it seeks to challenge Bentley ...

Workers born outside Japan are playing an increasingly important role in the world’s third-largest economy. Just don’t call it immigration. The country is often said to pride itself on homogeneity and an aversion to outsiders. But as Japan’s population declines and ages, employers are becoming aware of their constraints. The number of employees from overseas has more than doubled since ...

If ever there was a case of political miscalculation, it’s the collapsing relationship between President Trump and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome (‘Jay’) Powell. Trump seems to have believed that he could easily manipulate Powell into embracing an aggressively easy monetary policy whose main objective was Trump’s re-election. For his part, Powell seems to have believed that, ...

So divergent have their fortunes been since the financial crisis, European banks tend to trail their Wall Street peers on most of the metrics investors care about. Gender diversity at the top might be the next lagging indicator. There are rare bright spots in Europe. Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc promoted Alison Rose to chief executive officer, the first ...

It has been a busy month at Walmart Inc. First, America’s largest retailer said it would stop sales of some kinds of ammunition in the wake of a shooting at one of its stores in El Paso, Texas. Then the company said it would cease selling e-cigarettes as a mysterious lung illness has raised new concerns about the safety of ...

The Luxembourg court decisions on Starbucks Corp.’s antitrust tax case – which was a loss for the European Union — and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s – which was a win – offer important clues to how a much bigger tax showdown between Brussels and Apple Inc. might play out. While there’s something for critics and defenders of the EU 50-50 ...

India is making a second big fiscal gamble. The first – a switch from sales to consumption taxes – has failed to achieve revenue targets. The government, which two months ago was trying in desperation to tax everything that moved, has suddenly changed tack and is slashing levies on company profits. Will this revive animal spirits and sputtering GDP growth, ...

The UK Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) is the nation’s biggest steward of public sector retirement savings by membership, responsible for nest eggs almost 6 million members worth 275 billion pounds. So the revelation that it’s under pressure from the government to shift more of its money into passive products should be a wake-up call to a stock-picking industry still ...