Opinion

The world’s gold miners have spent years avoiding each others’ gazes like nervous teenagers. Now all of a sudden they’re acting like the thrill has gone. It hasn’t even been two months since Barrick Gold Corp. and Randgold Resources Ltd. announced that their merger was “consummated,” and already Executive Chairman John Thornton appears to be checking out an old flame. ...

There are nations on this earth that tax their citizens far more heavily than the US does. The top spots on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) rankings of tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2017 were held by France (46.2 percent), Denmark (46 percent), Belgium (44.6 percent), Sweden (44 percent) and Finland (43.3 ...

President Trump, in a rare reversal of a decision, has decided to keep “hundreds” of US troops in northeast Syria to provide “campaign continuity” and stability there as the fight against the IS extremists winds down, senior defense officials told me. “After studying it further, (Trump) has decided to take a different course” from the one he announced in December, ...

Europe’s political vicissitudes have been bad for France’s Orange SA and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG. Curiously, in one respect they’re proving positive for Spain’s Telefonica SA. All three reported earnings last week. Telefonica, long the poor relation among the former national carriers, provided the only bright spot, forecasting growing profit and sales this year where analysts had expected stagnation and ...

Business is booming in the European debt capital markets. Investment-grade corporate supply is up over 70 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2018. But the incentive for investors to keep piling in is starting to wane. Secondary market credit spreads, and the yield premium over existing debt that issuers typically offer on new deals, have ...

Bank Indonesia wants you to know it really, really likes stability. The stoutness, on display when the central bank kept interest rates unchanged, does nothing to address Indonesia’s inflation problem. The problem is that it’s too low. Like a lot of emerging-market central banks, Bank Indonesia has the ability and capacity to cut rates. It made no bones about why ...

This was supposed to be the China-New Zealand Year of Tourism, but the celebration appears to be off. An influential Chinese state-owned newspaper reported that Chinese tourists were having second thoughts about traveling to New Zealand thanks to suggestions that its government might bar Huawei Technologies Co. from the country’s next-generation wireless networks. A senior official at China CYTS Tours ...

Stop worrying about China’s ban on Australian coal. A Reuters report that the northern port of Dalian had banned imports from China’s biggest supplier of the black stuff sent ripples through global markets, driving the Australian dollar down as much as 1.3 percent after a whipsawing day of trade. London-listed shares in Glencore Plc, Anglo American Plc and BHP Group ...

The smartphone with a foldable screen, which Samsung will start shipping at the end of April, is far more than an expensive gimmick. With the release of the $1,980 Galaxy Fold, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd challenges Apple’s claim to premium pricing and unleashes, in what looked like a mature market, the same kind of race that Apple Inc. started with ...

The “Dreamers” lost again. As you will recall, the Dreamers are illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as young children. Most have grown up as Americans; sending them back to a country where they barely lived seems a particularly heartless punishment —and self-defeating for the United States if they’re responsible and productive adults. Happily, this is one ...