Opinion

China has marked the latest ratcheting-up of trade tensions with a misplaced history lesson. Far from worrying about its economic role in the world, the US should recognize just how well the two nations already support each other, according to a white paper released by China’s State Council: China-US bilateral trade has a strong complementarity. The US stands at the ...

Let there be no doubt, the budget that the Italian government is about to pass is a remarkable act of economic self-harm. It could take a long time to repair. The measures defy the rules of prudent debt management in order to fund outlays that will do little to improve Italy’s competitiveness. Most important, they tell investors that the populists ...

As in any relationship between people, once a company loses the trust of its customers, there is a long, lingering period of suspicion that the company will do something egregious again. There is suspicion that greedy banks will take on too much risk again. That Chipotle will make customers sick again. And that Facebook Inc. is too creepy and irresponsible ...

Good news in a tumultuous week: Congress is poised to expand a program that will boost aid to poor countries, project American values overseas, balance China’s rising influence, and (not least) offer taxpayers a tidy profit. Here’s hoping that common sense prevails and the idea becomes reality. Last week, as part of a reauthorisation bill, the House passed a measure ...

Japan’s economy is doing well. Unemployment is at multi-decade lows. Capital expenditure is up, as is return on equity. And wages are finally rising. For the longer-term, Japan also looks strong. Contrary to the popular myth that the country suffered multiple lost decades after the bursting of the bubble economy in about 1990, Japan has outperformed many other rich countries ...

Sky Plc’s takeover by Comcast Corp. is set to be one of the biggest acquisitions of a UK company by an overseas buyer. Expect more to follow. No one is bidding for a British target solely because sterling is 12 percent cheaper than just before the Brexit referendum — but the pound’s weakness is only making targets more digestible. The ...

A textile-yarn company in western Indian soon will have more machines than workers. A manufacturer in southern India sold almost double the number of its automated goods last year. India’s biggest carmaker has one robot for every four plant employees. Automation will double over the next three years in Indian factories, according to a survey by Willis Towers Watson. Companies ...

Remember last month, when an agreement between the US and Mexico left the world thinking we were on the brink of a radical rewriting of the North American Free Trade Agreement?. Things haven’t quite gone to plan. With a touted September 30 deadline for an accord just days away, President Donald Trump went on a tirade about his dislike of ...

If you thought Emmanuel Macron would use his 2019 budget to rethink his increasingly unpopular presidency, think again. The French leader is doubling down on the pro-business agenda that he’s been pushing through since taking power last year. There’s nothing wrong with this. Macron’s pitch to voters was that he would speed up growth by cutting the role of the ...

As the UK stumbles towards leaving the European Union, domestic investors are becoming increasingly gloomy about the outlook for the nation’s stocks. With a no-deal Brexit looking increasingly likely, their growing pessimism is justified. Investment manager Hargreaves Lansdown Plc just published its latest survey of UK retail investors. Sentiment toward domestic stocks is even worse than it was during the ...