Opinion

It’s one thing for academics in Asia to rant against the tyranny of the dollar, or to make cheery forecasts about its impending eclipse by the Chinese yuan. But now that Facebook Inc. wants to spawn a new global currency – one that could meet the “daily financial needs of billions of people” and perhaps rival the greenback one day ...

The most important variable in the current Persian Gulf confrontation is time. The Trump administration wants to play a long game, to draw the sanctions tourniquet ever tighter. Iran needs to play a short game, to escape the American chokehold before it becomes fatal. This inner dynamic helps explain this past month’s events in the Gulf – Iran’s steady escalation ...

It’s a good conservative principle that where possible, the government should recover the cost of its services from the people who use them, rather than from taxpayers at large. It’s also pretty uncontroversial that the government must oversee financial markets, to ensure that they are free and fair. It thus makes sense that the government should charge a user fee ...

Earlier this month, my colleague Elisa Martinuzzi suggested that merging Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG would, on paper at least, create a European banking champion. She concluded, though, that the regulatory obstacles to such a deal would probably be insurmountable. But there is a three-way combination that could create a regional lender with the heft to take on ...

In a week defined by the prospect of fresh monetary stimulus around the globe, the country sending the loudest signal may surprise you: Indonesia. In the months after the Federal Reserve’s January pause in rate increases, Bank Indonesia remained extremely cautious, weighing low inflation against its bugaboo, the current-account deficit. Now, the central bank is unambiguously hinting that cheaper money ...

Three Russians and one Ukrainian have been charged in the Netherlands for their alleged roles in downing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine five years ago. Only one of them may have been in active service in the Russian military at the time, but the international investigation has plenty of evidence of official Russian involvement. I’ve said before and ...

Serco Group Plc CEO Rupert Soames frequently boasts that the UK contracting firm was an early adopter of financial carnage – to stress that the business is now the better for it. Pulling through a crisis five years ago has given Soames the credibility to embark on M&A, and he has had his eye on defense contractor Babcock International Group ...

Two months after India’s oldest private-sector airline grounded its last plane, and with even a water-bottling firm threatening to drag the carrier into bankruptcy, a consortium of lenders led by State Bank of India can finally stop pretending that a white knight is coming. With the insolvency tribunal taking Jet Airways India Ltd. under its wing, there may be one ...

The US budget deficit is now almost $740 billion, the Treasury Department reported last week, prompting a new round of familiar criticism of 2017’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act: The law’s huge tax cuts were irresponsible, as were Republicans’ sloppy and at times deliberately misleading assertions that the law would pay for itself. That criticism is understandable, but it elides ...

For the past six years, there’s been no number more filled with dread for gold bulls than $1,350 an ounce. Barring a few brief spikes, the metal has struggled to break through that level ever since it came off its run-up to $1,900 between 2011 and 2013. This matters, because an asset that has few fundamental factors driving its performance ...