Opinion

Asos Plc’s Monday-morning disaster is only the start of British retail’s Christmas nightmare. The online clothing seller issued a severe profit warning on Monday. The shares initially fell 35 percent, amounting to an 800 million-pound ($1 billion) loss. A range of other chains were also dragged down. To some extent, it’s a surprise that the first seasonal shocker has come ...

China’s top leaders meet this week in Beijing to set economic policy objectives for the coming year. The central question is whether they will do what they want or what the country needs. Clear evidence has emerged in the past couple of months that the Chinese economy is slowing to an uncomfortable degree. That’s raised expectations that the leadership will ...

Critics have called the resignation of India’s former central bank chief Urjit Patel and appointment of former Finance Ministry official Shaktikanta Das as his replacement a blow to the hard-won independence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Such fears are overblown. The changeover at the RBI is something else entirely: an opportunity to rebuild the central bank’s badly damaged ...

Whenever a Japanese company acquires an overseas asset, the rationale is typically that it’s finding a way to survive the country’s aging demographics and shrinking returns. But Hitachi Ltd’s 800 billion yen purchase of ABB Ltd’s power grid business is bigger than that. The Hitachi-ABB deal, while on the expensive side, is high-margin for the Japanese industrial conglomerate, and could ...

It seems like every asset bubble has a famous anecdote of someone claiming, right at the top, that a crash is impossible. In the stock-market bubble leading up to the Great Depression, it was economist Irving Fisher, who declared in the New York Times that stocks “have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few days before a ...

The nine-year economic recovery is dead. Long live the recovery. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) — the Federal Reserve’s main policymaking body — meets this week to decide whether or not to raise interest rates. No matter what it does, the decision is likely to be criticised. Since late 2015, the Fed has increased short-term interest rates eight times ...

Italy’s populist government has pledged to the European Commission that it will lower its deficit target to 2 percent of national income next year. For a cabinet that vowed to defy the ‘bureaucrats’ in Brussels, this is a stunning climb-down. But unless Rome is ready to row back on some of the key pledges included in its 2019 budget, it ...

Falling yields on German government debt is the sign of a classic ‘risk-off’ mentality. As fear grows, investors plump for safety. But where’s the crisis in Europe? Yields on 10-year bunds have fallen steadily by 30 basis points in the past two months. And German notes out to eight years are now in negative territory. It’s hard to fathom why. ...

It’s unclear what UK Prime Minister Theresa May hoped to get from leaders of the European Union (EU) at their recent summit. As things turned out, she got less than nothing — a public brush-off that further weakened her standing at home, if that were possible. Her Brexit strategy has collapsed, and nothing is to be gained by persisting with ...

The ‘everything bubble’ is deflating. The fact that it’s happening relatively slowly shouldn’t blind us to the real threat: The world is dangerously underestimating how hard it’ll be to deal with the fallout once it pops. Frothy markets can’t disguise the warning signs. The shift to tighter monetary policies in the West is putting pressure on global equity and real ...