Opinion

When asked about President Donald Trump’s economic policies, most US business leaders are likely to offer a polite but nuanced response. They welcome measures that have improved the operating environment for their businesses and sustained America’s economic outperformance. But they also wonder whether more could have been accomplished by working across party lines and with international allies. That distinction is ...

Going by the mainstream business press, you’d think the big stories of 2019 in cryptocurrencies are the quadrupling of the price of Bitcoin and a shift by big institutions such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Facebook Inc. from the blockchain-not-bitcoin model popular from 2014 to 2018 to bitcoin-with-training-wheels. If you read technology newsfeeds, you’d instead focus on new highs ...

You could say many things to describe a week in which President Trump got in a snit about buying Greenland, called the Federal Reserve chairman an “enemy,” reversed his position repeatedly on China, and rebuffed European allies by saying he’s ready to invite Russia to a global summit at one of his Florida golf resorts. But “exhausting” would be the ...

What a difference a weekend makes. Emmanuel Macron emerged as big beneficiary from the G7 summit, a junket that has come under increasing criticism as the shrinking group of leaders struggle to forge a consensus in the era of Donald Trump. Last week, US president’s tone on Twitter was aggressively anti-European Union — but by Monday he was full of ...

Silicon Valley has a split personality about “brilliant jerks.” These are the kind of abrasive, boundary-pushing executives whom the industry (and often the media) lionizes — until they push boundaries too far and are kicked out of the tech Garden of Eden. Consider Anthony Levandowski, a former executive in Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving vehicle project whom the US government charged this ...

Dear Britain, please excuse the rest of us for our sheer disbelief: we were never expecting a constitutional crisis, let alone protests around the country. You are making Italy’s political system look like a model of composure, and that’s not something to be taken lightly. For years, we have admired your parliamentary democracy, with its eccentric rituals and timeless ceremonies. ...

Germany’s former transport minister (and current senior legislator) Alexander Dobrindt has proposed setting a price floor on air tickets, to eliminate the cheapest offerings from Europe’s ubiquitous discount airlines. The idea probably will be rejected for political reasons, but it’s actually one to consider when it comes to reducing air travel’s climate impact. It’s difficult to tax airline tickets: Taxation ...

Picking a new CEO is one of the most important decisions a board can take, yet one that Europe’s banks appear to be intent on flubbing. Lenders are struggling to find successors for the current crop of leaders. Take UBS Group AG. On August 29, the Swiss bank revamped its management board, hiring a star banker from a rival and ...

Wall Street was a very conservative place politically when I started working in the capital markets in 1999, but it seems to have lurched to the left lately. It’s not only that many of the people who work there have become more liberal, but more importantly, left-leaning behaviour by publicly traded companies is being rewarded by the stock market. The ...

On this Labour Day, the American economy — the source of jobs for almost all of us — is full of promise and peril. It is hard not to be impressed with its job-creation capacity. Since the low point of the 2007-09 Great Recession, payroll employment has increased by 21.7 million jobs, with strong growth under both President Obama and ...