Opinion

President Donald Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned about General Motors. In June, GM said that the various tariffs that Trump had either already imposed or was considering could “lead to less investment, fewer jobs, and lower wages for our employees.” These tariffs, the company said, risked “undermining GM’s competitiveness against foreign auto producers.” Now GM has announced that it ...

Joerg Boche is arguably the most important person in Europe’s corporate debt market right now. As the group head of treasury at Volkswagen AG, his decisions on the company’s funding are critical not just to the German autos giant but to European corporate credit spreads as a whole. VW had to rein in its bond issues after the Dieselgate scandal, ...

It’s election season in India and the money is flowing. Governments in many states have begun waiving tens of millions of dollars’ worth of loans to poor farmers in an effort to buy their loyalty. The argument – widely accepted by politicians and journalists, the demographic groups with the least fiscal instinct – is that India’s farmers are buckling under ...

China may be suffering from President Donald Trump’s trade war. A substantial number of Chinese companies are laying off staff, cutting wages and reducing capital expenditures. Prices are being slashed on goods subject to tariffs. And China’s export growth has slowed. Of course, US consumers and manufacturers will also get hurt by the tariffs. And there’s a chance that China’s ...

The idea that a company as powerful and autocratic as Facebook Inc. would ever dive into crypto-currencies has always seemed a bit like the Death Star deciding to throw a staff Christmas party. Whether it’s the Bitcoin model itself or the more corporate-friendly efforts to exploit the blockchain approach (distributed databases across networks within a business or industry) it’s been ...

KKR & Co. looks like it’s low-balling MYOB Group Ltd. Having initially offered A$3.70 per share for the Australian accounting-software maker, the private equity firm cut its bid to A$3.40. That’s still a premium to recent trading prices and the A$3.15 it paid to acquire a 17.6 percent stake. Yet it’s a discount to peers. KKR’s A$2 billion ($1.4 billion) ...

The governments of France and Italy, under pressure from voters to change their policies, have put forward rule-breaking budgets for next year, and the European Union (EU) has decided to let things slide. Under the current testing circumstances, this flexibility on enforcing the rules is understandable — but it isn’t necessarily wise. To be sure, Italy’s populist administration has climbed down ...

After sending two pesky central bank governors packing in a little over two years, Indian bureaucrats have turned their attention to unwinding the monetary authority’s autonomy. Their first move, unveiled last week, is an innocuous – even laudable – infusion of Rs 41,000 crore ($5.9 billion) into troubled state-run lenders, bumping up this fiscal year’s outlay for bank recapitalization by ...

Avoiding the devastating consequences of global warming means taking steps that will incur costs now. Those costs can be painful, as illustrated vividly by the social unrest in France, triggered in part by President Emmanuel Macron’s since-rescinded fuel tax. For some, such as the New York Times’s Bret Stephens, the lesson is clear: Forget reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because people ...

In my medicine cabinet, I have a jar of petroleum jelly from Walgreens that looks like the iconic Vaseline container. You probably also own store-brand versions of familiar items — also called generics or “private label” products. The pull tends to be lower cost, but Walmart, Macy’s and other big retailers have been seeking to create private-label products with a ...