Opinion

Have US and Chinese trade negotiators been meeting with each other in recent months, or with bands of convincing impostors? You almost have to ask the question, because media reports about who “broke the deal” over the past week seem to have been filed from two different universes. In a Reuters report and attributed principally to three US government sources, ...

Singaporeans may be in line for some good news. The central bank’s decision to transfer S$45 billion ($33 billion) to the island’s sovereign wealth fund could push back an increase in the consumption tax. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said in a statement that foreign-exchange reserves of S$404 billion are more than it needs to manage the local dollar ...

Unlike some of his peers, UniCredit SpA Chief Executive Officer Jean Pierre Mustier can’t be faulted for wavering. In his three years on the job, he has sold assets and cut costs to put Italy’s largest bank on a more solid footing. He now faces a much harder task: finding growth. While the headline first-quarter results the lender were the ...

The UK has been a leader in the fight against climate change, reducing its carbon dioxide emissions by more than 40 percent from 1990 levels. Now the government’s Committee on Climate Change wants to set a far higher goal: net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. Although short of what climate activists in London have lately been demanding, this target is still ...

Hong Kong’s stock exchange is poised to lose its crown as the world’s leading IPO fundraising venue again, and this time there may be no easy way back. The bourse trails in third place behind the Nasdaq and New York exchanges so far this year, having topped the global rankings in three out of four years between 2015 and 2018. ...

Good things come to those who wait. If you’re a Commerzbank AG shareholder, that could be a very, very long time. The German lender is midway through a revamp that aims to revive profitability, in part, by gaining customers. On May 8, Commerzbank showed it has been steadily winning those new clients. But it’s still far from clear whether the ...

Even before markets opened last week, President Donald Trump set the tone with a pair of tweets that threatened additional tariffs on China and lamented that a trade deal was coming along “too slowly.” Instinctively, investors’ eyes were glued to the S&P 500 Index, watching to see whether it would tumble from its recent record levels. The benchmark hung tough ...

At a time when America is facing a potential military confrontation with Iran, an escalating trade war with China and a showdown with North Korea, you’d think President Trump would want a permanent secretary of defense to oversee Pentagon plans. But Patrick Shanahan is still cooling his heels as acting secretary, awaiting a formal nomination that was expected nearly two ...

The forthcoming European parliamentary election was meant to be Facebook Inc.’s big chance to please a constituency that trashes it on a regular basis: Politicians. After all of controversy around fake news on website and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company hired the former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to help clean up its act. The social network has ...

It raised $3.5 billion from the stock market in March, only for its market value to dwindle by almost $8 billion. AstraZeneca Plc’s first-ever stock sale has been a painful experience. It could become an unwelcome deterrent to other companies that ought to do the same. The British drugmaker was exploiting its strong share price to get its financial house ...