Opinion

In many ways, David Malpass, whom US President Donald Trump nominated to head the World Bank, is an unsurprising choice. He’s a senior Treasury official overseeing international affairs. Plus, his background absolutely screams “Trump nominee”: He isn’t a woman (Indra Nooyi, formerly of PepsiCo Inc., was being considered). He is an outspoken critic of the institution he is now to ...

When people think about Amazon disrupting the economy, they tend to focus on physical retail — all those disappearing bookstores — but the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report makes it clear that its focus is increasingly moving onto the turf of other tech companies. Amazon.com Inc.’s fastest growth is in ads and Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s “other” line of business, which ...

As Prime Minister Theresa May continues to bang her head against a hard Brussels wall, the probability that the UK will leave the European Union (EU) without an orderly separation agreement increases with every wasted day. The biggest loser if that happens would be the UK, but the EU countries also have a stake. They haven’t neglected preparations for a ...

Russia’s official statistics agency is displaying a feverish optimism under its new boss, Pavel Malkov, who took office in December. On Monday, the agency reported that in 2018, the country’s economy grew the fastest since 2012. Coming on top of a recent data revision that eliminated the 2016 recession, the recent numbers seem increasingly fishy, including to some government economists. ...

Italy is not hanging about. Hot on the heels of its successful 16-year syndicated bond sale in mid-January, it has announced a new 30-year placement. Given the “fill your boots” hunger for all types of debt at the moment – from Turkey to Uzbekistan – it will probably get away okay. It’s certainly priced that way. But with the political ...

In case you were worried, the advertising titans of the internet are doing just fine. Facebook Inc. showed that last week by reporting a 30 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenue from a year earlier. It was the lowest growth rate in the company’s short history, and the company has many challenges to keep growing, but it turns out that Facebook ...

America needs a Green New Deal. That’s easy to say. Spelling out what it means, or ought to mean, is harder. Democrats leading this campaign intend the allusion to the first New Deal — FDR’s multi-front assault on the Great Depression — to convey urgency, ambition, commitment to social justice, and breadth of policy, except this time with the need ...

For a capital-starved economy, India shows little urgency to extricate good money stuck in failed businesses. That was going to change after the adoption of a modern bankruptcy regime in May 2016. Alas, legal improvements notwithstanding, the culture of extending the life of bad loans to big businesses and pretending nothing is wrong with them is proving too hard to ...

Marking the 20th anniversary of zero interest rates in Japan ought to be an exercise in humility. Like the eldest child of a large family, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) was on its own for a while. Those that followed — the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank (ECB), to name but two — had it a bit easier. Some ...

In some theologies, purgatory is where the souls of the dead undergo purification of their sins before rising to heaven or descending into hell. As the deadline for Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) approaches, UK assets face a similarly binary outcome — making investors justifiably unwilling to take big bets on the endgame. As things stand, it remains ...