Opinion

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is an experienced central banker and won’t be surprised at the rough reception he’s been getting lately from analysts and commentators. This kind of treatment is traditional, almost mandatory, for a recently appointed Fed chief. Nonetheless, it shows he’ll have his work cut out in nudging the Fed towards the approach to monetary policy he ...

The Chinese economy is sputtering, deflation looms and businesses are downbeat. Trade tensions with the US portend an even scarier growth outlook. The Federal Reserve, too, has given China more room to ease. So where are the outright rate cuts? Beijing has pulled out many other weapons from its vast arsenal. Most recently it introduced a new tool that extends ...

Exxon Mobil Corp. wants you to know it is serious. On February 1, Darren Woods became the first CEO of the famously aloof oil major to grace an earnings call in 15 years. Fortunately for him, he had some decent results to talk about. After several quarters of decline, year over year, Exxon’s production finally ticked up in the last ...

About three years ago, Anup Kuruvilla left his corporate banking job in Hong Kong to return to Bangalore and assemble a group of wealthy individuals willing to place small, early-stage bets on fledgling founders. 1Crowd, the platform Kuruvilla and his partners helped set up, has 500 investors. Members co-invest with 1Crowd Fund, sharing the risks in mentoring young ventures: Some ...

The handmaiden of peace is exhaustion. We are seeing that lesson in Afghanistan and Yemen. Fragile peace agreements are emerging in both conflicts, thanks to skillful diplomats. There are a hundred reasons why each negotiation may fail. But a process has started: Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, said, “We have a draft of the [peace] framework that has to ...

Central bank watchers will readily agree that the policy meeting this week marked the formal end of the first attempt by Chair Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve to lead markets rather than succumb to their will. What they are less likely to agree on are the major reasons for the shift, and it is the answer to this latter question that ...

Samsung Electronics company’s fourth-quarter earnings tell a tale of falling demand for technology products and components. Revenue dropped 10 percent – the most in almost four years – with operating profit down 29 percent, the worst decline since 2016. Chips were the major reason for the weakness, the South Korean company told investors. Fourth quarter earnings of the company were ...

The European Union’s governments are encouraging the European Commission to weaken its antitrust standards to promote “continental champions.” Europe, they say, needs larger companies to compete on an equal footing with US and Chinese giants. This idea is a mistake, and it rests on an economic fallacy. Big firms aren’t necessarily more efficient than smaller ones, especially when they’re big ...

If Britain’s Parliament were the final arbiter of Brexit, last week vote would have been historic. It would have been a crowning achievement for Prime Minister Theresa May: Leavers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour Party members debated for six hours and voted seven times before a majority finally said what they want to happen. It wasn’t any of that. The ...

A furious rage-tweet is not the best way for a CEO to get merger approval from competition regulators. Yet Siemens boss Joe Kaeser indulged in exactly that, blasting Margrethe Vestager – Europe’s top antitrust official – as “backward” and overly technocratic because of her likely rejection of his company’s rail merger with France’s Alstom SA. “It must be bitter if ...