Opinion

Three years on from the UK’s vote to quit the European Union (EU), its failure to come up with a realistic plan for how to withdraw is pretty farcical. Officials at the Bank of England aren’t laughing, though. Mark Carney, the bank’s governor, has gone slowly on raising interest rates as he waits for the fog of Brexit to clear. ...

Closing a leveraged buyout in Germany can be as painful as pulling teeth. That isn’tdeterring KKR & Co. as it tries to grab a stake in the country’s most influential publishing business. The US private equity firm’s 6.8 billion-euro ($7.7 billion) deal to take Axel Springer SE private with its founding family comes with some big compromises. They only highlight ...

For four years, India has battled the suspicion that its new and improved GDP series is a rose-tinted view of reality. Now that Narendra Modi is prime minister for a second term, he must see that battle for what it is: a lost cause. Unlike harmless advertising puffery around a toothpaste that kills 99.9% of germs, the narrative of 7% ...

The other day, US President Donald Trump retweeted my column about overtourism in Europe. I’d simply accept the extraordinary publicity of the presidential retweet, if he hadn’t claimed in his tweet that an undervalued euro is the reason Europe faces an excess of tourists. That, in my view, is largely inaccurate; a weak euro really isn’t the story behind Europe’s ...

Japan Display Inc.’s (JDI) decision to cut staff, reduce pay and take more write-offs was the inevitable result of management’s shortsighted strategy. A planned bailout by a consortium of new backers is unlikely to solve its core problems unless key changes are made. I argued in February that the company needs new leadership. On Wednesday it announced just that: President ...

In May, the Toronto Star launched an in-depth series on climate change in Canada, with a straightforward title: “Undeniable.” It’s an apt description of the evidence within the reporting and elsewhere in publicly available data. “Undeniable” might be a useful descriptor, but let’s frame climate change differently: how this reality manifests itself within the human experience, and how politics are ...

Donald Trump doesn’t have to impose sanctions on Russia’s controversial NordStream 2 pipeline to Germany if he wants Europe to buy more US liquefied natural gas. The market is doing his work for him. Increasing competition is already reducing the European Union’s dependence on Russian exports, and US LNG is an increasingly important factor in determining prices. Asked during an ...

China’s overseas M&A isn’t quite dead. But you can forget the acquisition of strategic assets in the West: That $45.5 billion record purchase by China National Chemical Corp. of Swiss agribusiness firm Syngenta AG in 2017 is a thing of the past. With Beijing still worried about capital outflows, and protectionism deepening globally, the value of China’s deals abroad fell ...

The changing nature of food retailing was laid bare last week with lower than expected UK sales growth at Tesco Plc and Amazon.com Inc. expanding its partnership with the smaller British chain Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc. Amazon’s agreement with Morrisons, while still fairly small right now, shows the ambitions of the online giant toward the UK, already one of the ...

It’s easy to sense signs of strain in the US economy: inversion of the yield curve, lackluster jobs data and an escalating trade war with China. It’s more difficult to gauge when a slowdown turns into a recession. Predicting its severity – mild or monstrous? – is even more difficult. Recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ...