Opinion

During election years such as this one, India’s outgoing finance minister offers up only an “interim budget,” under the assumption that the incoming government will have different policy priorities. Given that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was reelected so easily, one might think the budget it’s scheduled to present on July 5 won’t look much different. It should. Modi’s new ...

Exchange-traded funds have never quite been a perfect fit for the bond market. In fact, some of the main selling points of ETFs — real-time pricing, instant liquidity and the ability to trade at a low cost — run counter to some of the core tenets of traditional fixed-income investing. The buy-and-hold types don’t need to know precisely where their ...

While any global meeting that involves Donald Trump has the capacity to surprise, one thing was virtually certain about the weekend’s G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan: The gathered leaders issued a pious call to work together to shore up growth, trade and the global financial system. The challenge they face is much bigger than that, however. And good intentions aren’t ...

Sellers of euro-denominated corporate bo-nds had their best fund-raising month for three years in June, topping off their best six months since 2012. Some 210 billion euros ($238 billion) in new company debt was snaffled up by investors between January and June, 21 percent higher than the same period last year. Conditions are rarely better than this for company borrowers ...

For the past year and a half, the US Federal Reserve has been paring down the multi-trillion-dollar portfolio of securities it purchased to support the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Now, Chairman Jerome Powell has suggested that the Fed might end this “quantitative tightening.” I think that would be a bad idea. When the Fed announced its last monetary-policy ...

Relief that Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping came to a trade truce will likely be short-lived. That’s because the two men have less command over the forces shaping global commerce than they might like to think. The decline of trade and manufacturing began in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, long before either leader came to power or ...

Employment is no doubt the best indicator of the recession I’ve been forecasting. The recent deceleration in US jobs growth suggest that the business downturn may already be underway. In terms of timeliness, payroll employment is superior among major economic statistics since it is monthly, not quarterly, and reported early, generally on first Friday of the month for data covering ...

The protests in Hong Kong have, rightly, captured the world’s attention. If the demonstrations provoke no small amount of anxiety for onlookers living abroad, the strain on the city and its residents is surely acute. With streets getting closed and travel disrupted, businesses there will inevitably feel an effect. The world’s most famous luxury goods brands will not be immune. ...

The calls to break up Facebook — or at least to consider it — are growing louder by the day. On the left, Elizabeth Warren got on the antitrust bandwagon early with a plan for dismantling the company and other tech giants, while on the right Republican Senator Josh Hawley has mused, “Maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.” ...

Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, wrote a provocative op-ed in the New York Times last weekend. Titled “When Dead Companies Don’t Die,” it argues that unprecedented monetary stimulus from global central banks created a “fat and slow” world, dominated by large companies and plagued by a swarm of “zombie firms” — those that should be ...