Opinion

This week’s G-20 summit in Japan will showcase both what’s best and most frustrating about this once-promising construct for coordinating global policy. A simple institutional fix could address many of the problems. All that’s required is some bold leadership on the multilateral stage. Founded in 1999 to include 19 countries and the European Union, the G-20 was the result of ...

Ten months ago, I warned that storm clouds were brewing over the global technology industry. The situation today is much worse. Back then, a US-China trade war was more risk than reality, Apple Inc.’s pending iPhone update held promise, and central banks were still in tightening mode. Yet inventories at the end of June 2018 had climbed to the highest ...

When Volkswagen AG admitted rigging diesel emission tests in September 2015, its German rival Daimler AG sounded pretty dismissive in defending the compliance of its own Mercedes-Benz vehicles. “We categorically deny the accusation of manipulating emission tests regarding our vehicles,” the luxury car giant said. If Daimler shareholders concluded from that statement that the company wouldn’t have to recall any ...

Mario Draghi has worked nothing short of monetary miracles over his eight-year term as European Central Bank (ECB) President through a sequence of unconventional policy interventions. As we count down the days to Draghi’s departure, expectations are building once again that he will be able to pull one final rabbit out of the hat. Whether long-term loans to banks, a ...

Since the days of Thomas Malthus, we’ve worried that overpopulation is about to overwhelm our planet. Those fears haven’t gone away. A further two billion people will be added to the current world population of 7.7 billion by 2050, the United Nations Population Division said in a report. Numbers will still be rising as the total approaches 11 billion people ...

Viral Acharya’s departure as a deputy governor of the India’s central bank is worrisome, though not altogether surprising. Last October, Acharya delivered a hard-hitting speech on central bank independence. While that ostensibly dealt with Argentina in 2010, the thinly veiled similarity with New Delhi’s plan to raid the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) balance sheet didn’t fool anyone, least of ...

FedEx Corp. may finally be waking up to the threat Amazon.com Inc. poses to its business model. The logistics company is offering big discounts to help fill the planes in its Express delivery network with more e-commerce shipments, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. The deals are being used to woo customers away ...

For years, Russia has been the world’s biggest sovereign gold bug: Even while gold prices were in the doldrums, it doggedly kept increasing its reserves. Now that gold is at the highest level since 2013, the tactic appears to be paying off. The US dollar’s dominance as a global reserve currency is commonly thought to result from the dearth of ...

China’s central bank is stretching its arms far and wide to stem convulsions in the real economy. In the process, it’s lending legitimacy to financial firms that have long operated in the shadows. Beijing has invited non-bank financial institutions to play a larger and more formal role in the aftermath of the first regulatory takeover of a commercial lender in ...

The euro area economy is in a real bind, as Mario Draghi admitted at European Central Bank (ECB) summit in Portugal. So he won’t have been too thrilled that his suggestions on how to respond were subject to a rapid and damning response from the world’s most famous Twitter account. “Mario Draghi just announced more stimulus could come, which immediately ...