Opinion

If you haven’t started raising interest rates in earnest already, forget it. Central banks that have dawdled have missed the cycle. Growth seems to have peaked, and markets are signaling potential trouble. For those outside the US who tightened consistently, this is a prudent time to look around and reassess. Nations that could reasonably have been expected to raise borrowing ...

Investors are throwing billions of dollars at connected cars. The technological advances that enable vehicles to be linked into wireless networks promise greater efficiency and, in theory, safety. They also open the possibility of being watched and monitored more closely — and that may be a problem for China’s self-proclaimed rival to Tesla Inc. Nio Inc., the electric-vehicle maker that ...

Sergio Ermotti, the chief executive officer of UBS, will hope that the selloff battering global markets is merely a “healthy correction,” as some investors have described it, rather than something more serious. The past five years have seen the boss of UBS Group AG deliver on a promise of reliable returns and dividend payouts, largely by boosting his wealth management ...

Europe’s leaders have come down hard on Italy for its plans to increase spending with the aim of boosting growth and helping the poor. What they fail to recognise is that a little stimulus might be just what the Italian economy needs. The outlook for the global economy is deteriorating more rapidly than forecasters realise. A slowdown in China has ...

Globalisation strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship. For decades, promoting startup firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, ...

BT Group Plc’s pick to replace its boss Gavin Patterson, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co., is Philip Jansen, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co. Indeed, it was Jansen – currently co-CEO at Worldpay Inc. – who first brought Patterson into the telecoms world, hiring him at the turn of the millennium for a ...

For a long time, bankers’ concerns about the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) didn’t seem to have much effect on London’s role as a global financial hub. That might be changing. One measure of London’s prominence is the amount of international lending that originates in the UK. A German bank, for example, might provide financing to an Irish ...

What’s the most important bit of infrastructure to connect an international metropolis like China’s Pearl River Delta? A demolished border post. For all the excitement around the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge last week, that’s probably the best lesson to draw from Beijing’s plan to draw Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan and other cities into a single megalopolis. ...

As Italy digs in to resist European Union (EU) demands for budget moderation, some investors say only one thing can reverse the government’s spiraling borrowing costs: the collapse of the populist administration. The coalition’s determination to ramp up spending has pushed the yield on Italian bonds to highs not seen since the euro-area debt crisis. As long as the nation’s ...

Boeing Co. is a bright spot in a rough week for industrial earnings. The planemaker reported better-than-expected third-quarter results, and raised its guidance for 2018 adjusted profit. Boeing also maintained its goal of delivering 810 to 815 commercial airplanes this year, easing pre-earnings jitters over a relatively weak shipping rate in the third quarter. That should provide confidence that bottlenecks ...