Opinion

If the ultimate goal of lower interest rates is to spark economic activity through demand for loans, then the Federal Reserve’s first cut in more than a decade can be deemed a failure. After the central bank lowered its target rate for overnight loans between banks on July 31 to a range of 2% to 2.25%, demand for credit among ...

A type of financial engineering that proved to be toxic during the financial crisis is slowly making a comeback as banks try to offset the risk of their borrowers not repaying their loans. Capital relief trades, or synthetic deals, are making a comeback – and Europe is about to refine the rules of the game. Getting those right will be ...

The longer Hong Kong protests drag on, the less likely China will be to unleash the trillion-dollar stimulus markets seem to want. Beijing has become painfully aware that its easy-money policies of the past inflated asset bubbles and widened the wealth gap. Any repeat endeavours could risk stoking social unrest on the mainland. Over the past decade, China flooded its ...

In Japan, is there one standard of justice for Japanese executives and another for non-Japanese executives? The forced resignation of Nissan Motor Co.’s chief executive officer, Hiroto Saikawa, certainly seems to suggest as much. When Nissan wanted to get rid of its then-chairman Carlos Ghosn, it conducted an internal investigation that was kept from Ghosn, found some examples of allegedly ...

The verdict of history is that the trade war that’s now raging between the United States and China will lead to no good — with consequences that could go well beyond trade and threaten the world’s geopolitical and economic stability. How this plays out is anyone’s guess, but we should not pretend that there is no danger in letting the ...

The tidal wave of asylum seekers that hit Europe in 2015 is often stereotyped as an invasion of poorly qualified migrants destined to be charity cases in the receiving countries. Recent research shows it’s not true. Germany, which welcomed the immigrants and almost immediately regretted it, is likely to end up profiting from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let them ...

Vincent Bollore is developing an unfortunate habit of losing. The French billionaire who controls Vivendi SA emerged bruised from the latest round of his battle with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Bollore has been trying to block the merger of Berlusconi’s Mediaset SpA with its Spanish subsidiary. Vivendi is the second-biggest investor in Mediaset but Bollore has so far ...

India’s plunging auto sales are making investors nervous. Their bigger worry should be the vanishing new roads. The country’s top six automakers reported a 29% decline in August sales. A 45% slump in commercial vehicle sales by Tata Motors Ltd., the No. 1 Indian truck maker, added to the gloom. With GDP growth facing its longest slump since 2012, India ...

The idea of capping rents for five years in Berlin, the city where they have been going up faster than anywhere else in Germany (except much cheaper Leipzig), has always smacked of Communist price controls. Now the Berlin Senate has published a legislative proposal on how a rent ceiling is supposed to work – a clear indication that the leftist ...

The generational divide is described and defined in many different ways, some more empirical than others. Many of these theories are speculative rather than confirmed, so in that spirit I would like to offer my nomination for what is truly the dividing force: screen size. In a nutshell, younger people today are very comfortable with a small screen and older ...