Opinion

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has taken a lot of heat about his failure to effectively communicate the central bank’s intentions with its first interest-rate cut since the financial crisis. One thing he was clear about, though: Policy makers find stubbornly low US inflation concerning, and persistently missing the Fed’s 2 percent target for price growth was a chief reason ...

Americans reading gloomy headlines about the trade war with China could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Bloomberg’s consumer comfort index, a weekly phone survey conducted since 1985, is running at its highest levels since 2000. Similar gauges of the household sector, such as the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index and the Conference Board’s various ...

Smartphone sales may be stagnating, but one particular strand of technological wizardry behind them is not. Companies that make the sensors powering your phone’s camera and facial recognition system are preparing for a mini boom. The slowdown in global smartphone sales has made life tougher for semiconductor makers. Chips giants from Qualcomm Inc. to Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have all ...

If you want an unequivocal example of how Brexit has hurt the British taxpayer, look at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Since its record-breaking bail-out in the financial crisis, the Scottish lender has struggled to get back on its feet. It tried shrinking its trading businesses, shedding assets and eliminating costs — only to be stymied by a string ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell tried to thread the needle between dovish and hawkish at his press conference, but realistically had no hope of pleasing market participants who thought a series of interest-rate cuts were already in the bag. The Fed just isn’t there yet. This reduction in rates was the insurance against bad outcomes. Going forward, conditions will need ...

Boris Johnson is playing the part of the “madman” negotiator to a tee. The new British prime minister insists he will take his country out of the European Union on October 31 with either a completely new withdrawal deal or none at all — however high the economic cost. With Johnson refusing to even meet his EU counterparts until they ...

As if the luxury goods industry didn’t have enough to worry about with the troubling developments in its key Asia markets, Hugo Boss AG has raised the specter of things going wrong in America too. The maker of smart suits said that its sales (when excluding currency movements) and earnings growth would be at the lower end of its anticipated ...

Every so often you see someone demand that leaders abandon their focus on gross domestic product in favour of other metrics of economic success. Some countries are actually trying to do this; for example, New Zealand just introduced a happiness index (Bhutan did something similar two decades ago). But modifying GDP is probably more trouble than it’s worth. GDP does ...

Among intelligence professionals, President Trump’s nomination of an inexperienced, partisan politician to oversee America’s spy agencies prompted deep dismay — but also a stolid reaffirmation of the spymaster’s credo: Let’s get on with it. This combination of incredulity and stoicism was voiced by a half-dozen current and former officers I spoke with about Trump’s choice of Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, ...

Wall Street’s worst first half in more than a decade for trading is turning out to be surprisingly less painful for some European firms: Credit Suisse Group AG and BNP Paribas SA managed to claw back some of the market share they had previously lost. But counting on a continued rebound could be a mistake. Switzerland’s second-biggest bank reported a ...