Opinion

When, how or if Britain gets an early general election is unclear, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been on a snap-election footing since Day One. Whenever it comes, and whatever the state of Brexit at the time, the next election could dramatically redefine the battleground of British politics. One possibility is a vote of no confidence in Johnson’s ...

Elliott Management Corp. is resuming confrontational activism in Germany, potentially reviving fears that “locust” funds are back and up to no good. Investors are probably being too skeptical that Elliott will be able to force positive change. The activist hedge fund has lambasted managers at Scout24 AG, a Frankfurt-listed online real estate and car classifieds business capitalised at 5.4 billion ...

Even the most promising national economies can get big stuff within their control basically right and still be blindsided by events utterly beyond their control. Like, ahem, the trade conflict and market tumult. That’s certainly the case with Indonesia, a sprawling country of more than 260 million people tipped to have one of the biggest economies by mid-century. President Joko“Jokowi” ...

The US Federal Reserve’s next meeting is still five weeks away, and President Donald Trump is already talking the economy into a recession in his campaign for lower interest rates. Markets shouldn’t take his latest salvo too seriously. The Treasury Department formally labelled China a currency manipulator for the first time since 1998 after Trump took to Twitter to castigate ...

Long on a roll, right-wing nationalists finally seem to be overreaching. Evidence came from two different sources this week: India and Britain. Brexit, advocated and promoted by mostly English nationalists, always threatened the breakup of Great Britain. With new Prime Minister Boris Johnson now vowing to leave the European Union on October 31 without a deal and regardless of the ...

Even after a relationship is dead, couples often go through the motions of remaining in a marriage. That’s the best way to characterise what’s left of the alliance between Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co. Renault must sell down its 43.4 percent stake in its Japanese partner to 5 percent-10 percent and both sides should “invest in new ventures,” Nissan’s ...

This has been the summer of the electric scooter in Europe; but the UK and Ireland, which still ban the things, are probably right to hold out. So far, no government in the region has figured out a good way to regulate them. US e-scooter sharing companies like Bird, Lime and Jump (a subsidiary of Uber) have all been expanding ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has not been shy about saying what he’s trying to do: prolong the economy’s expansion so that it creates more jobs for those who, in the past, have often felt left out. The Fed increasingly sees itself as a social agency dedicated to job creation. That — more than the effect on stock prices — ...

Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Just 18 months into the job, John Flint has stepped down as CEO of HSBC Holdings Plc. It may be time for this lumbering giant to turn to an outsider rather than the homegrown veterans that the bank has typically chosen as its leaders. Flint was cut from the same cloth as his predecessors, having ...

It didn’t take long for the Donald Trump tweet. That you can get more than 7 Chinese yuan to the dollar for the first time since 2008 was always going to be a red rag to the White House bull in the escalating economic battle between Washington and China. The president tweeted — inevitably — that Beijing was a currency ...