Opinion

Last week, the New York State Assembly passed the most aggressive clean-energy target in the United States, requiring New York to get 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emissions sources by 2040. Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is expected to sign the bill into law, called it “the most aggressive in the country.” On the other side of the country, Oregon’s ...

Yields on German government bonds last week ventured deeper into the uncharted territory of negative nominal levels, triggering various direct and indirect market reactions. More subtly, this reinforces a trend of the past decade: Advanced countries are behaving more like emerging economies in certain ways. This does not mean that these countries are converging down towards their less prosperous and ...

Central banks and financial regulators have been on high alert since the launch of Facebook Inc.’s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra. It’s still at the conceptual stage, but the prospect of a tech giant with 2.6 billion users shuffling digital money around and backing it with piles of dollars, euros and pounds is a potential heart attack in the making for those ...

Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most influential economists in the United States. But the 61-year-old’s authority does not stem from advancing an arcane scholarly finding. Nor has Mankiw coined some catchy phrase that captured the popular imagination. Instead, Mankiw’s power derives from his position as the author of one of the most-widely used introductory college economics ...

That the Democrats’ two evenings of dueling oratory snippets are called “debates” validates Finley Peter Dunne’s prediction that “when we Americans are through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Already a linguistic casualty of the campaign is the noun “socialism.” So, quickly, before Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign ...

The new central-banking toolkit looks a lot like the old one. European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi drew President Donald Trump’s ire after remarking that he’s prepared to act forcefully to combat slowing growth and receding inflation. What was remarkable about Draghi’s comments – beyond the fact that Trump even paid attention to them – is how undeterred he ...

Pfizer Inc. is demonstrating once again how expensive it is for pharma firms to buy their way to growth. The company announced that it’s paying almost $11 billion for cancer drugmaker Array Biopharma Inc. The deal would bolster Pfizer’s cancer portfolio and add medicines that could meaningfully augment sales and profit. But the company isn’t getting much of a bargain, ...

Boeing Co. just got a big vote of confidence, but it still has much to prove. The commercial-jet maker announced a surprise order for its 737 Max jet – the first since the top-selling aircraft was involved in two fatal crashes that prompted regulators around the globe to ground it and sparked a full-blown crisis for the company. British Airways ...

China’s central bank has acknowledged its monetary tools are insufficient. The most powerful ones are proving too blunt to drill through a hardening financial system. The country’s money markets have been shuddering since regulators took over Baoshang Bank Co. last month, despite initial assurances from the central bank and other authorities that they would maintain ample liquidity. While there has ...

5G networks will allow vast gobs of data to be transmitted at great speeds. And more data usually means more money for mobile carriers like Deutsche Telekom AG and AT&T Inc. But there’s a hitch. Cloud giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are lurking. The new tech enables ever more computational decision-making to be carried out ...