Opinion

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been increasing signs that the Trump administration — and particularly the president himself — is moderating its position on North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Gone are the adamant statements that the US will only accept complete, immediate and irreversible denuclearisation. Instead, we’ve seen a symbolic but historic meeting between Trump and ...

Christine Lagarde’s nomination as president of the European Central Bank (ECB) has sparked controversy over whether she’ll be up to the job. But there’s another position to fill at the top of the ECB that’s nearly as important. Benoit Coeure, a member of the bank’s six-strong executive board, will leave at the end of December after serving an eight-year term. ...

Last March, McDonald’s Corp acquired the startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million, in the hope of employing machine learning to personalise customer experience. In the age of artificial intelligence, this was a no-brainer for McDonald’s, since Dynamic Yield is widely recognised for its AI-powered technology and recently even landed a spot in a prestigious list of top AI startups. Trouble ...

After seven months of labouriously convincing the international markets that he can be trusted with the presidency of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador risks seeing all his work undone by tweet. The sudden resignation of Carlos Urzua as his finance minister, and the resignation letter he posted on Twitter are deeply damaging. In combination, they are almost exactly what investors ...

Netflix Inc. and the soon-to-come HBO Max app need a little of what each other has. In the meantime, consumers may be the ones who lose out. If you’re like me, you’ve started to realise that despite a vast number of video-streaming apps, none on its own offers the ideal mix of content best suited to your tastes. And if ...

Corporate credit markets have bad news for stock investors. Low yields imply that it’s going to be tough for stocks to rally much further from here. Since equities made what was then an all-time high in January 2018, performance of the stock market has largely tracked the movement of investment-grade corporate bond yields. The rise in yields in 2018 acted ...

President Donald Trump has been hunting for reasons to extract trade concessions from the European Union with the eagerness of a dog scrabbling around for a bone buried in the back yard. First came Germany’s $24 billion car trade surplus with the US, with Trump coming close to labelling the import of cars made by BMW AG, Mercedes and Volkswagen ...

President Donald Trump has a real thing for cleanliness. As he made clear at an event staged at the White House, this extends far beyond copious use of hand-sanitizer – from sea to sanitary sea, no less. Kicking off his remarks on “America’s Environmental Leadership,” the president spelled out his concerns: From day one, my administration has made it a ...

The co-founders of India’s No. 1 airline are engaged in a bitter feud. Their quarrel couldn’t have come at a worse time for minority shareholders of InterGlobe Aviation Ltd., the company that owns IndiGo. Investors were just starting to enjoy the fruits of a frenetic expansion that saw the no-frills carrier, Asia’s largest, double its capacity in the three years ...

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had a chance to push back against both over-aggressive bond traders and Trump administration officials who were pounding the table for interest-rate cuts. He had the cover of not just a strong rebound in the US labour market but also the backing of regional Fed presidents like Patrick Harker and Loretta Mester, who had already ...