Opinion

India’s far northeast is beautiful, friendly and one of the most ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse places on earth. Multiple distinct ethnic groups share the hills, dales and great valley of the Brahmaputra River with indigenous tribes, tea garden workers originally from central India, ethnic Nepalese, and Bengalis — both Hindu and Muslim — from the Gangetic delta. As in ...

If the trade war’s objective is to even the playing field for American firms, President Donald Trump isn’t going about it the right way. China’s easy access to US dollars over the past decade has fuelled asset bubbles, driven an overseas debt binge and laid the groundwork for its low-cost, export-driven economy. Only cutting off the supply of cheap money ...

The US Federal Reserve has developed a pretty poor track record for meeting its inflation and employment goals. If it wants to do a better job, it should follow Canada’s example and set some deadlines. More than four decades ago, Congress mandated that the Fed’s monetary policy pursue two objectives: price stability and maximum employment. In January 2012, the central ...

Take Hong Kong protests, add a dash of Brexit and then stir in the death of brick-and-mortar shopping. It’s hardly surprising that a savvy investor would want to bail from its stake in AS Watson Group, a retailer based in the former British colony with a big UK footprint. These latest geopolitical flash points have been cited for Temasek Holdings ...

Buried among the storylines about global trade and political intrigue from the G7 summit last month is perhaps the most noteworthy one of all. Business for Inclusive Growth, or B4IG, a coalition of 34 multinational companies with more than 3 million employees and revenues topping $1 trillion, unveiled an initiative to tackle inequality with help from the Organisation for Economic ...

As crowds gathered last week to protest UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament ahead of Brexit, a distraught woman pushed her way in front of the cameras to voice her fears of being kicked out of the country. “I’m Portuguese and I’ve worked here for 20 years,” she said, explaining that her bid to register for the ...

Bernie Sanders relishes the disdain of America’s business elite, proudly displaying on his campaign website his anti-endorsements from corporate titans and their apologists. It’s theme he has championed his entire career — and it appears to be gaining purchase on both sides of the aisle. Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls corporate America the biggest threat to liberty in America. ...

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said he wouldn’t be surprised if yields on US bonds turned negative and if they do, it wouldn’t be “that big a of a deal.” That seems to be a sentiment widely held in central banking circles these days, but it’s wrong. Negative interest rates represent a threat to the financial system. To ...

A 15% tariff that went into effect September 1 on about $112 billion of goods imported from China will start pushing up prices of clothing, shoes and other consumer goods arriving at US ports this week. That should start taking a serious toll on shopping in the US. While 82% of intermediate inputs are already affected by tariffs, just 29% ...

How to make sense of the whopping $47 billion in lease liabilities that WeWork disclosed ahead of its planned IPO? That figure makes WeWork one of the world’s largest lessees, according to Bloomberg data, which is pretty astonishing considering the flexible office space provider was founded less than a decade ago, bleeds cash, and doesn’t plan to become profitable any ...