Opinion

Russian claims this week that they’ve been exonerated by Robert Mueller’s final report make my skin crawl. But they highlight the critical question of how the US and Russia can begin to move back towards a saner relationship. Frankly speaking (as Russians like to say), the first step is for Russia to stop pretending that it didn’t meddle in the ...

Emmanuel Macron is basking in the spotlight of Brexit. His performance at the summit of European leaders, in which he took a tough line publicly against the UK’s desperate request for a delay to the March 29th deadline, has been compared to Charles de Gaulle’s repeated refusal to let Britain join the European Community in the 1960s. An unconditional delay? ...

Budget aviation ain’t what it used to be. Passengers on Easyjet Plc aircraft can book fares that let them change flight times at no extra cost. Those on Singapore Airlines Ltd.’s Scoot and JetBlue Airways Corp. can pay for business-class seats, and people flying Juneyao Airlines Co. can collect frequent flier points and spend them on flights with Star Alliance ...

For the best part of a decade, politicians and investors have looked at the European Central Bank (ECB) as a guiding light through uncertain economic times. They may need to adapt to a new reality. On three important questions for the future of the euro zone, the ECB just cannot make its mind up. The first dilemma is the outlook. The ...

Boeing Co. is in a heap of trouble right now — there’s no getting around it. The two deadly crashes of its new plane, the 737 Max, killing 346 people, have cost it an enormous amount of reputational capital, and will undoubtedly cost it a lot of money — in lawsuit settlements, in multi-million-dollar payments to airlines that have had ...

The world is littered with startups that have struggled to become genuine challengers to traditional banks despite chalking up plenty of customers. Hong Kong may be different. The city kicked off its virtual banking revolution by issuing three licenses, two of which went to ventures led by note-issuing banks. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is processing five more permits. This ...

In view of the bad feeling unleashed by Japan’s detention of Carlos Ghosn in November, one might have expected Renault SA to keep things quiet for a while. Ghosn was head of the giant Renault-Nissan carmaking alliance and one theory for his downfall was that he was pushing too hard for a full combination of the French and Japanese companies. ...

Economists tend to think of central-bank interest rates purely in terms of their effect on macroeconomic benchmarks such as inflation, output and unemployment. The Federal Reserve’s dual mandate, for instance, directs it to seek stable prices and maximum employment. Mainstream macroeconomic models, such as the dominant New Keynesian models used by most central banks, support this view. Occasionally, economists or ...

Once British lawmakers finally decide what kind of Brexit they want, the pound surely ought to break out of the tight range in which it has traded against the euro since Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU). Just don’t expect too sharp a collapse if it really comes to a messy, no-deal Brexit. It helps that the pound ...

The newly published 2019 US Energy & Employment Report reveals that the fuels and electric-power-generation sectors employ nearly 2 million people. It’s a wealth of data not just on what people do in energy, but also on where employers foresee growth and hiring tightness. A few trends jump out — including that, even in the oil patch, services jobs are ...