Opinion

The European Union (EU) is close to outlawing some single-use plastic products, such as cutlery, straws, coffee stirrers and cotton swab sticks – but the measures are too narrow and too lenient towards producers to have a meaningful benefit for the environment. The EU, as one of the biggest producers and the biggest exporter of plastic waste, should do better ...

For bond investors, there’s something inherently offensive about negative-yielding debt, even though it’s nothing new by now. Conceptually, buying a security that effectively guarantees a loss if held to maturity goes against the core purpose of fixed-income investing — preserving principal and earning steady interest payments that exceed the inflation rate. Across the globe, the amount of debt with negative ...

On March 28, Lyft Inc. sold its first batch of stock as a public company. It’s a milestone for the on-demand transportation company, and it kicks off the great tech unicorn IPO barrage of 2019. Depending on your perspective, this flood is either validation for the class of companies created since smartphones and cloud computing made new technology businesses possible ...

There are still some economists who fear another crash. The latest is Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. In a new article, he warns that the economy may be on the edge of a giant “wealth bubble” that will collapse with possibly-dire consequences. Steuerle is especially worried by parallels between Americans’ present wealth — ...

With Mario Draghi halfway out of the door, the battle is on for the future direction of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy. The nature of the contest is arcane, to say the least. For a while now, the Banque de France governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau has been pushing the idea of “tiering” deposit rates to ease the pain ...

The European travel operator Tui AG was so proud of its fleet of 15 shiny new Boeing 737 Max jets that it’s been naming them after popular holiday destinations: Costa del Sol, Rhodes and Tenerife Alegria are among those christened since deliveries started last year. Tui was expecting to take delivery of another eight 737 Max aircraft by the end ...

Surely never in the history of British politics has so much effort been expended to so little effect. Another week of frantic Brexit drama yielded no change in the choices facing the UK, and brought the country no closer to deciding. It’s still either leave the European Union with no deal, accept the withdrawal agreement Prime Minister Theresa May has ...

March 29 was meant to be the day that Britain officially left the European Union (EU). It was instead the day lawmakers rejected Theresa May’s exit deal for a third time, plunging the country deeper into crisis. It marked the ninth consecutive “no” vote this week, after MPs rejected eight ways forward. In the end, May summed it up best: ...

For all the hullabaloo about Western nations banning network equipment made by Huawei Technologies Co., the importance of that business to the Chinese company is decreasing. Sales to phone carriers slipped to 41 percent of total revenue last year, according to Huawei’s annual report. That’s the lowest portion on record. Revenue from consumer products, notably smartphones, climbed 47 percent to ...

Apple’s News+ service makes a a grab for the news junkie’s Holy Grail: a universal subscription to get behind all paywalls, the Spotify (OK, OK, the Apple Music) of journalism. So far, Apple doesn’t have it right. That would take a much more creative effort than the company may be capable of achieving. Compared with creating a universal subscription for ...