Opinion

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond barely uttered the B-word in the more than 70 minutes it took him to unveil the latest UK budget on Monday. Inevitably, though, Brexit was the elephant stomping around the room — or, rather, one of them. Exit negotiations with the European Union (EU) are stalled over a disagreement about how to keep ...

Watch out HSBC Holdings Plc. The digital banking revolution is coming for all the easy money the UK-based bank has long taken for granted. Hong Kong was HSBC’s birthplace as the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp., and the former British colony remains its single biggest market, a source of sticky deposits and ready borrowers. For now, that’s still boosting the ...

As 20 finalist cities in the US compete for the right to host Amazon’s second headquarters, Google has had to drop plans for a campus in Berlin after the project was rejected by residents and the leftist city government proved unenthusiastic. There are two ways of looking at this: It confirms a lasting US advantage over Europe when it comes ...

A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that we’ve probably lost our chance to keep the planet’s temperature within a safe zone for humanity, which would require limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. Doing so would mean entirely transforming the world’s diet, agriculture practices and energy infrastructure ...

IBM just made the cloud-computing war far more interesting. International Business Machines Corp. announced that it’s buying Red Hat Inc., one of the most successful pioneers of a software movement known as open source, which allows programming instructions to be accessible to anyone to view and alter. Red Hat’s version of the Linux open-source software became widely used in companies’ ...

Europe’s leaders are engaged in a high-stakes standoff with Italy, trying to coerce the populist government to drop its budget-busting spending plan. But how far can they go? Can they risk pushing Italy out of the currency union? Judging from the exposures of French and German banks, they have a strong incentive to seek a compromise. Looking at what banks ...

Pity Philip Hammond, the UK’s chancellor proposed a budget amid political chaos, faltering public services, simmering anger, and, in the background, the specter of Brexit. Also: He’s supposed to simultaneously cut taxes, end austerity and reduce debt. It’s an impossible task. And this budget — the last before Brexit — will be a premonition of bigger debates to come. Start ...

Despite efforts by the Trump administration to turn it, a supertanker is bearing down on drivers, oil majors, and even Amazon.com Inc. We are 14 months away from a shake-up in the global oil market lacking the drama of, say, Iranian sanctions. It involves a UN-mandated crackdown on air pollution from ships. Still awake? Good, because this could mean some ...

Long-simmering discord between the Indian central bank and the government is turning into a very public brawl. The timing couldn’t be more awful for markets. In a hard-hitting speech on central-bank independence, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor Viral Acharya startled his audience by invoking Argentina of 2010. Back then, the Argentinian central bank chief quit after being coerced ...

If governments, companies and markets needed any further reminders that their operating environment is changing, they got it last week. Despite weakening economic momentum and volatile financial markets, a second systemically important central bank, the European Central Bank (ECB), reiterated its intention to stop using large liquidity injections to support economic activity and asset prices. The change in this ‘global ...