Opinion

Break out the bubbly: Global financial regulators are starting to cooperate for the greater good as the Brexit deadline looms ever closer. Just don’t mistake an uneasy truce for a lasting peace. The agreement between EU securities regulator Esma and the Bank of England is another step towards creating a post-Brexit safety net for the $400 trillion global derivatives market, ...

And just like that, this is no longer Marvin Ellison’s J.C. Penney Co. The department store chain said it is going to get out of the business of selling major appliances. With this move, new CEO Jill Soltau has reversed course on a key initiative of Ellison, her predecessor in the top job at the troubled retailer. This decision does ...

Time to liberate Australia’s economy. It needs to be freed from folklore that’s built up around the 27-year stretch sans recession. The reality is that the expansion waxed and waned during that period. Business cycles aren’t dead Down Under, despite Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s only half-joking proposition in November that they are defunct in Australia. It’s waning now. That’s ...

The first results of Finland’s two-year experiment with a universal basic income (UBI) are in, and if they’re confirmed by further research, they will probably hurt the unconditional income cause. The trial run showed that “money for nothing” makes people happier but doesn’t inspire them to find work anymore than traditional unemployment benefits would. The Finnish experiment, conducted in 2017 ...

A US hedge fund is taking on the British government and major banks in protest at the pain inflicted on ordinary shareholders in the latest rescue of a troubled UK construction company. It is picking a tough battle, but its plan is far from doomed. The company in question, Interserve Plc, revealed outline details of a restructuring package designed to ...

Just a year ago, India’s third-largest mortgage lender was bragging about how it had shrunk its financing costs by replacing bank loans with market borrowings. Now, Dewan Housing Finance Corp. is confronting the fallout of that seemingly clever strategy, one that many of its peers face as well: a dangerously high exposure to India’s struggling developers. At the end of ...

Iraqi President Barham Salih measured his words in a telephone interview from Baghdad. He didn’t want to worsen a quarrel with President Trump over US access to an air base in western Iraq. But Iraqi politics is fragile, and ill-considered statements by American presidents can have big consequences. “I appreciate what the US has done to help Iraq,” Salih told ...

Call it beginner’s luck. India’s interest-rate cut, a surprise to most economists, was justified: Inflation is well below target and growth is slowing across all major economies. In that regard, the South Asian country is firmly in the mainstream. Where India isn’t in the mainstream is in the inability of a nominally pro-business government to hang on to a central ...

Europe’s tour operators are on a holiday from hell. TUI AG, which until now has defied the downturn in the region’s travel market, cautioned on earnings. Then Thomas Cook Group Plc, which delivered a nasty profit warning in November, said it was “reviewing” its airline business. These two mainstays for Europe’s holidaymakers have been hit by a triple-whammy. First, last ...

China is ‘half of everything,’ such as aluminum, steel and copper consumption. For the electric vehicle (EV) sector, China is at least half of everything, if not far more, in three key areas: It represents 76 percent of all commissioned lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity; logged 60 percent of global EV sales in fourth-quarter 2018; and held 50 percent of global public ...