Opinion

India aims to curb cash – but this time it wants to do it properly. A cashless society wasn’t the original goal of the country’s draconian currency ban in November 2016. But when an acute shortage of banknotes gave a fillip to digital wallets, that purpose was added as an afterthought to justify an act of farcical state overreach. The ...

We may be on the cusp of an upheaval in global trade. Since World War II, the international trading system has operated on the premise of “most favoured nation (MFN),” meaning that concessions granted to one country must be extended to all countries in the system. The trade standoff between the United States and China suggests that this approach is ...

There’s a question that anyone who watched Mario Draghi’s press conference must ask themselves: Should we look at the European Central Bank’s (ECB) slightly guarded official position or listen to the more dovish messages from the president? The answer will determine one’s confidence about central bank’s ability to fight a new euro zone slowdown. It might also influence whether that ...

Partly by default, and partly by design, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has managed to assemble a newish-looking team for his second term. Hopefully, the freshness will carry over to ideas. The top job in the finance ministry opened up as Arun Jaitley, who held the position during Modi’s first five-year term, made himself unavailable for health reasons. The prime ...

The European Union’s (EU) move to discipline Italy for excessive public borrowing poses an awkward question: What use are rules that lack credibility against a member that acts in bad faith? The answer is not much. The EU’s fourth largest economy hasn’t just fallen short of complying with the bloc’s budget rules — its populist government has openly and repeatedly ...

When running for reelection, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers stressed that, under his administration, India had become the world’s “fastest-growing large economy.” This was never much of an achievement; after all, the People’s Republic of China was in the midst of a significant slowdown even before the trade war. But even that no longer seems to be ...

The Dutch-based navigation company TomTom NV has discovered in the course of research for its 2018 traffic congestion index that the German cities with the highest and fastest-growing apartment rents are also the most congested. This finding contains an important message for city planners: Instead of trying to fight cars, perhaps it’s worth putting effort into building more housing and ...

Google made another acquisition for its cloud-computing business that competes with Amazon.com Inc. Each deal it does is a reminder of Google’s failures so far in this lucrative field and a potential warning sign to the software specialists that have thrived in the last decade. Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said that it was spending $2.6 billion to buy Looker, ...

Behind the admission by a former CIA officer that he plotted to spy for China lies an astonishing tale of Beijing’s espionage against America — and the vindication of other CIA officers who were falsely suspected of being the Chinese mole. This saga has a classic thriller plot, in which a suspect must find the real villain to clear his ...

This is the moment the US technology superpowers surely knew was coming: The US government is preparing to crawl all over Google to figure out whether it is an abusive monopolist. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and the other tech giants should be quaking in their fleece vests. Bloomberg News and other news organisations reported that the US Department of ...