Opinion

Asia’s most stubborn central bank just reversed course. With the Federal Reserve all but certain to renew its easing cycle at the end of the month, the Bank of Korea preemptively cut its benchmark interest rate to 1.5 percent from 1.75 percent, in a decision that surprised roughly half of the economists polled by Bloomberg. The central bank aimed to ...

Ursula von der Leyen has clinched the presidency of the European Commission with a razor-thin margin of nine votes. It’s a win for the national governments that backed her, a loss for the European Parliament that dreamed of putting forward one of its own — and a sign of some very tough tussles ahead for the 28-member bloc. When pulling ...

Heading into this earnings cycle for the biggest US banks, analysts were already plenty worried about net interest income, which is how much the firms make from customers’ loan payments compared with what they pay on deposits. After all, long-term interest rates have plummeted since the end of last year amid signs of slowing global growth and the Federal Reserve ...

It was similar to the maligned film director who says, “My movie isn’t bad, the audience just isn’t smart enough to understand it.” Except this time it was the chief executive of a $30 billion telecoms equipment firm talking about his quarterly earnings. Ericsson AB’s adjusted operating profit hit 3.9 billion kronor ($415 million) in the three months to June, ...

Do people really care about income inequality? Or when they use the term, are they really thinking about something else? You would certainly think from the US political debate that Americans want to close the rich-poor wage gap. In 2013, President Barack Obama famously asserted that inequality is “the defining issue of our time.” Or take Senator Elizab- eth Warren, ...

Donald Trump has called the European Union a “foe” and has threatened to “tariff the hell” out of the 28-country bloc. So where should we put the chances of the US president agreeing a trade deal with Brussels before he has to face reelection next year? In a surprising burst of cheerful optimism, Germany’s economy minister Peter Altmaier places them ...

When you’re in the business of buying and selling, timing is everything. That’s the costly lesson facing BHP Group, which is looking at options to divest its thermal coal assets according to a report by Thomas Biesheuvel of Bloomberg News that cited people familiar with the matter. Arch-rival Rio Tinto Group raised $2.7 billion selling mines in the Hunter Valley ...

The S&P 500 has breached 3,000 for the first time — but the market for initial public offerings is certainly not celebrating. The world’s biggest stock sale of the year looks likely to price at the lower end of its price range, and a big UK listing has just been pulled. Rising markets may be making issuers greedy. Buyers of ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was right in making clear during his Congressional testimony that despite the strong jobs report for June, the central bank will cut interest rates for the first time since 2008 at its monetary policy meeting. He was wrong in dismissing the need to reduce rates by half a percentage point. By lowering its target for ...

The stereotypical view that the European Union is far from the minds of most Europeans is challenged whenever a technology-related topic is on the agenda of the European Parliament. Over the 10 years that I served there, few battles for legislative outcomes were more fiercely contested. But the attendant controversies often lead to protracted processes, ambiguous laws and ineffective regulation. ...