Opinion

Resisting unusual pressure from both politicians and notable market participants, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues on the Open Market Committee raised interest rates by 25 basis points and slowed the path for future hikes by less than markets hoped. In doing so, the central bank reaffirmed that its focus remains firmly domestic and economic. But markets’ reaction ...

What a difference two decades makes. In 1997, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) was about 11% of the US’. By 2017, it was up to 63%. But this overstates the difference in living standards between the two countries, since prices are generally lower in China. In purchasing-power-parity terms, China’s economy became the world’s largest in about 2013: So which country’s ...

There has been a ton written over the past few months — some but far from all of it inspired by Amazon.com Inc.’s “second headquarters” search — about the diverging economic fortunes of America’s metropolitan areas. A lot of it has been very interesting and informative. Taken as a whole, though, it can be pretty confusing. Are we, for example, ...

Italy’s populist rulers may have been hoping for some market contagion fear to help them win their budget standoff with Brussels, but so far it’s been a dog that didn’t bark. The economic program of the League and Five Star spooked investors in Italian government bonds, but failed to affect any other member state of the monetary union, barring Greece. ...

Imagine American politics for a moment as a laboratory experiment. A foreign adversary (let’s call it “Russia”) begins to play with the subjects, using carrots and sticks to condition their behaviour. The adversary develops tools to dial up anger and resentment inside the lab bubble, and even recruits unwitting accomplices to perform specific tasks. This 21st-century political dystopia isn’t drawn ...

Almost immediately after she safeguarded her position as leader of the Conservative Party on December 12, Prime Minister Theresa May headed to Brussels to try to gain concessions from the European Union (EU) before a second vote in Parliament on a Brexit deal. Her tireless efforts are commendable. But if success eludes her in the next few weeks, her negotiating ...

Britain’s latest retail sales report won’t save Christmas. The volume of goods sold in stores and online jumped 1.4 percent in November compared with October, according to the Office for National Statistics, smashing through the 0.3 percent forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Excluding fuel, the increase was 1.2 percent. Black Friday discounting seems to have played a big ...

Fourty years ago, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched the most dramatic economic transformation in history by encouraging his countrymen to “emancipate” their minds and “seek truth from facts.” The reforms that followed — he called it socialism with Chinese characteristics — were stunning in their impact. China’s GDP today is more than 80 times bigger than it was at the ...

Why do you call them shadow banks? That’s a criticism I’ve heard often since I started chronicling the troubled world of India’s nonbank finance companies following the high-profile bust of infrastructure lender IL&FS Group in early September. Some readers saw the characterisation as an attempt to equate India’s pedigreed financiers of mortgages and consumer loans with China’s peer-to-peer lenders and ...

Juergen Fitschen probably thought life would become a bit calmer when he stepped down as co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank AG in 2016. Later that year he was nominated supervisory board chairman of German electronics retailer Ceconomy AG, where the 70-year-old now collects a salary of 240,000 euros, a fraction of his Deutsche days. And then, all hell broke loose. ...