Opinion

For investors trying to take into account environmental, social and governance concerns, the best response seems to have been to adopt a version of St. Augustine’s prayer: “Oh Lord, make my strategy pure, but not too quickly.” For whenever the issue of socially responsible stock-picking arises, so too does the suspicion that doing good comes at a price. A study ...

“Defeat” is too small a word for the rebuke Britain’s Parliament handed Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday. Her Brexit deal, laboriously negotiated over many months, was voted down on Tuesday by a massive 230 votes — a far bigger margin than expected, and the worst loss of any British government in modern times. Yet if this brutal rejection has caused ...

At times of great global upheaval, policymakers often reach for familiar historical analogies to help them make sense of an uncertain future. Consider the debate over whether the deepening confrontation between the US and China constitutes a “new Cold War.” It is a marker of how quickly US-China relationship has deteriorated that commentators are invoking the analogy. Only three years ...

Germany is about to remind Facebook Inc. that the tribulations of 2018 are far from over. In fact, they’re about to get even more real. The country’s Federal Cartel Office intends to ban Facebook from collecting user data from third parties, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. This will also prohibit data sharing between WhatsApp and Instagram, which Facebook owns. ...

For people in the US, the American Dream is a vision of broadly shared prosperity, freedom and opportunity. Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream focuses on rising incomes and national renewal. Australians once had a simpler aspiration: owning a detached suburban home on a quarter-acre of land. That vision died a while ago. Back in the 1980s, single-family detached homes comprised about ...

At home and abroad, people are now asking a question they’ve dreaded for nearly two years: How will the erratic presidency of Donald Trump function without the steadying hand of Jim Mattis as defense secretary? Life without Mattis is the scary reality of this new year. The president may have tired of the careful, battle-hardened advice he received from the ...

Jaguar Land Rover’s job cuts will do little for its turnaround plans. The UK luxury unit of India’s Tata Motors Ltd. will eliminate 4,500 positions globally as part of a $3.2 billion cost-cutting program outlined in November. The savings will be relatively minor. Workforce reductions are now standard in an industry struggling to deal with rising costs from technology, pricier ...

Investors waiting for 5G to boost Xiaomi Corp.’s fortunes might as well take their money elsewhere. Founder and CEO Lei Jun told Bloomberg News that he expects the advent of next-generation wireless to energize demand for its smartphones: We are at the eve of 5G and when 5G phones start to get popular, the overall demand from China will recover. ...

The latest data on Germany’s economy is surprisingly grim. Industrial production fell sharply in November, and the country is on the brink of a technical recession. Its government should get ready to loosen fiscal policy if output doesn’t bounce back soon. November’s 1.9 percent month-on-month decline in industrial production followed a 0.8 percent drop in October. The economy’s overall output ...

Instead of blaming the central bank at every opportunity for its poor stewardship of the economy, India’s finance ministry should reflect on its own record, especially its five failures of fiscal policy in almost as many years. The most obvious is the goods and services tax. A month after the levy went into effect in July 2017, a little over ...