Opinion

Line Corp. investors are so desperate for any shred of good news that reports of a tie-up with Tencent Holdings Ltd. drove the stock’s biggest gain in two years. Users of Tencent’s WeChat Pay will be able to buy goods through Line’s platform at local retail outlets, the Japanese company said at a briefing in Tokyo. Nikkei had reported on ...

The departing head of the European Banking Authority has issued a warning over the state of the EU’s so-called stress tests, which are meant to show whether banks have sufficient capital to weather bad news. Andrea Enria, who’ll shortly become head of the supervisory arm of the European Central Bank (ECB), is right that the system needs reforming, but his ...

Markets hate uncertainty, and Brexit has it in spades. Leaving the European Union (EU) seems to present the UK with an unappealing choice of either a lot of economic harm via crashing out without a deal, or slightly less damage via Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement. But there are reasons why investors might start thinking about more blue-sky scenarios: Either a ...

Dismantling the opaque underbelly of China’s financial system is proving far tougher than Beijing could have imagined. After rolling out a stream of reactive regulatory measures over the past year, authorities are now preparing to effectively phase out the $176 billion peer-to-peer lending market, Bloomberg News reports. Small and medium-size P2P platforms will be wound down, while large ones will ...

Anyone puzzled by how the Indian economy manages to grow swiftly while somehow failing to be prosperous could do worse than look at the state of India’s airlines. Over the past four years, passenger growth in India has been rapid: The number of flights taken has increased between 15 and 20 percent per year. Demand growth this year is likely ...

President Trump, do yourself a favour. Stop attacking the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell (yes, the same Powell you nominated). The result would be better for you, better for Powell and — most important — better for the country. Unfortunately, Trump can’t seem to restrain himself. The Fed has been raising short-term interest rates since late 2015 and ...

Just as the sun seems to be setting on nuclear power in rich countries, Taiwan’s voters have delivered it a new lease on life. A plebiscite on whether to repeal a law requiring the country’s four operating reactors to switch off by 2025 passed with 59.5% of the vote in the country’s local elections. As a result the government will ...

Just what does a no-deal Brexit look like? Everyone is bracing for it – some even talk of stockpiling food and medicines – but nobody quite knows what the consequences of driving off the cliff-edge would be. As UK Prime Minister Theresa May uses that fear of the unknown to prod lawmakers into approving her imperfect but take-it-or-leave-it deal, Paris ...

The construction of Nord Stream 2 — a pipeline for delivering natural gas from Russia to Germany — could hardly have come at a worse time. The United States and Europe are already feuding over trade, defense spending. Now, the US opposition to the pipeline sets the scene for another falling out. To be clear, the US is right to ...

Russia is preparing to sell bonds denominated in euros for the first time since 2013. Despite the recent drop in oil prices, it has a budget surplus and doesn’t really need to borrow; the bond placement is a test of the ‘dedollarisarion’ program, put in place by President Vladimir Putin this year. If the test and the plan are successful, ...