Opinion

BlackRock used to be able to skip over market mayhem. Now it seems as if the ground is shifting under it. The S&P 500 Index rose 13% in first quarter, a big snap back from 2018, when it was down 6%. BlackRock’s earnings did fall last year, but world’s largest asset-management firm was still able to produce a relatively impressive ...

It’s hard to find anyone who is, at least publicly, in favour of Deutsche Bank AG’s merger with Commerzbank AG. Even one adviser on the deal privately acknowledged what most observers suspect: putting together the two ailing German banks will only create a bigger lender with exactly the same problems. That’s not exactly an endorsement of what would be Europe’s ...

Asia expert Ezra Vogel published his influential book “Japan as Number One” 40 years ago. At the time, he argued that the US needed to adopt aspects of Japan’s supposedly superior economic system if it wanted to compete with the East Asian powerhouse. Policymakers in Washington were wise to ignore him. While Japan sank into a financial crisis and three ...

Almost 10 years after the Great Recession ended, the growing threat of a new economic slowdown raises a troubling question: When the next recession strikes, what can the world’s central banks do? With interest rates low and their balance sheets still loaded with assets bought to fight the 2008 crisis, do they have the tools to respond? The US economy ...

Grief is not too strong a word for the emotion that hundreds of millions of people around the world felt as they saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame in flames. It wasn’t just that one of Europe’s most beloved buildings was burning, terrible as that was to watch; it was knowing how much this astonishing creation has meant to Parisians, ...

Nationalism has been a feature of political discourse in Indonesia since the republic’s inception after World War II. It’s taken on more of an edge since the Asian Financial Crisis and return to democracy. Now, in every election, candidates compete to trumpet their economic patriotism. In the current campaign, challenger Prabowo Subianto has gone further and accused elites of selling ...

It looks like Jet Airways Ltd.’s luck has finally run out. India’s oldest privately owned airline is on the verge of shutting down all its flights — it already has perhaps fewer than 10 aircraft active — because it simply doesn’t have enough working capital. It’s more than a billion dollars in debt and has lost money for the last ...

Citigroup Inc. executives appear optimistic about the momentum they see across the firm’s businesses, from branded credit cards to M&A and treasury services. Whether the modest revenue expansion they expect for this year will enable the US bank to get closer to its financial targets is another question. The bank’s new CFO, Mark Mason, presented his first set of earnings ...

Britain’s plans to regulate online content have triggered an unsurprising furore about censorship. But that’s largely fine with the technology giants – because it distracts attention from a bigger problem that goes to the heart of their business model. The white paper on online harms is an effort to curb the online spread of dangerous content, such as incitement to ...

Is Julian Assange a journalist? The Justice Department sidestepped that question in its indictment of Assange. But his case is still certain to stir a debate about whether the WikiLeaks founder deserves protection under the First Amendment. Assange was arrested in London on April 11, as US prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing him of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack ...