Opinion

When the world’s de facto central bank rustles up an interest-rate whirlwind, you don’t use a fig leaf of flexible exchange rates to stand in its path. That memo, already well-received in Indonesia, doesn’t seem to have reached India. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) chose to hold its policy interest rate at 6.5 percent last week. And by delaying ...

Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to raise wages to $15 an hour for all of its US workers is good news. It will mean more money in the pockets of thousands of hard-working Americans struggling to make ends meet. Even more importantly, Amazon’s example may start a trend, encouraging other companies to raise wages as well, and prompting workers to demand more. ...

Across the US Midwest, farmers are taking in their annual harvests of corn, soybeans and sorghum. This year, they have a special problem: Where to put it all? Grain storage levels already have been extraordinarily tight. For the past two years, about 73 percent of capacity was used up in the December peak season, when the three crops are newly ...

Within the space of little more than a year, the European Central Bank (ECB) will see two profound changes at its top. At the end of 2018, Daniele Nouy will step down as head of the Supervisory Board, the body in charge of overseeing the euro zone’s largest banks. Then, in the autumn, it’ll be Mario Draghi’s turn to leave ...

The jewel gathering dust in India’s bankruptcy court can have a suitor after all. The two top bidders may stay in the race for Essar Steel India Ltd.’s 10 million-tons-a-year plant, the country’s top court ruled, provided they first make banks whole. There’s the catch. For ArcelorMittal, the payment required is for two unconnected defaults. The world’s biggest steel producer ...

Sometimes, Brexit seems like it might subsume British public life entirely. So some credit is due to Prime Minister Theresa May, who tried to articulate a broader agenda at her party’s annual conference this week. Regrettably, her policies were a mix of modest improvements and ambitious mistakes — a schema largely out of tune with the challenges the country now ...

Reading Greg Miller’s gripping new account of President Trump’s entanglement in the Russia investigation, it’s striking just how many of the president’s difficulties have been self-created. Trump sees enemies everywhere around him; he should look in the mirror. As the book’s ironic title makes clear, Trump has been ‘The Apprentice’ in the White House. New to government, buoyed by sycophantic ...

Maybe it was inevitable that Facebook Inc. would become the first big target for Europe’s new data privacy rules. After Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant revealed a security breach last month that hit at least 50 million accounts, Ireland’s data protection authority now says it’s investigating whether its safeguarding measures were compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which ...

Japan’s storied trading houses are emerging from the shadow of billions of dollars of impairments they took after the financial crisis and the end of the commodity super-cycle. Stocks of the so-called sogo shosha, the groups that drove Japan’s postwar export success — the likes of Itochu Corp., Marubeni Corp. and Mitsubishi Corp. — have rallied as much as 36 ...

As Americans become more negative about the state of their society, a number of people have tried to cheer them up by reminding them of the improvements made, both inside their society and out. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress project puts out a steady stream of data about improved living standards and social indicators in the US and around the ...