Opinion

It feels good again to be an investor in Italian government debt. Since the start of September, the yield on the benchmark 10-year bond has fallen from 3.24 percent to 2.79 percent, and the spread with German bunds has narrowed sharply. Bondholders seem confident that Italy’s finance minister Giovanni Tria will get his way in passing a prudent budget, despite ...

Now that everything has been said about the 10th anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, it’s worth asking how close we are to the next crisis. In the market for corporate loans, investors have fulfilled at least one prerequisite: They’re dropping their guard. The financial cycle has a lot to do with inattention. When something bad happens, people are careful ...

The West has turned hostile to open markets, but trade isn’t in retreat everywhere. In other parts of the world, it’s flourishing. The fashionable label “deglobalisation” misses the shift in import and export patterns that has seen emerging markets account for an increasing share of global trade in goods. Not the least of these is China’s expanding role as customer, ...

Most studies of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and the economy have focused on developed countries such as the US and Britain. But through my work as a scientist, technology executive and venture capitalist in the US and China, I’ve come to believe that the gravest threat AI poses is to emerging economies. In recent decades, China ...

An escalating trade war, rising oil prices and a bear market in stocks — China Inc. is struggling. A multibillion-yuan windfall from corporate tax cuts might be the only way to revive animal spirits. Yet Beijing is walking the other way, preparing to break the camel’s back. Starting in January, China’s tax offices will collect companies’ social-security contributions as part ...

He may have struggled to mend India’s broken banking system, but at least Prime Minister Narendra Modi is shrinking the number of state-run banks to 19 from 26. Although that’s nowhere close to the original idea of ending up with just six, it’s a good start. The next step will be to nudge most taxpayer-funded banks away from me-too corporate ...

A ll during the 2008-09 financial crisis, Americans were told that the government was saving Wall Street not to protect overpaid bankers but to help Main Street avoid a second Great Depression. It was a hard case to make. However valid the logic, it was overwhelmed by infuriating realities — government was pouring tens of billions into the financial system ...

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is poised to lead the world in IPOs. In the past eight months, the city hosted 132 initial offerings to raise a total of $23.8 billion, surpassing the $20.6 billion garnered by the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) 40 sales. That’s an impressive record. Now for a less impressive metric: Hong Kong trails New York ...

We all know the sage advice that in a gold rush the best thing to do is sell shovels. My caveat would be to ensure you’re paid in cash. And just to be clear for the modern world, this does not mean getting paid in Bitcoin Cash. Yes, I am looking at you, Bitmain Technologies Ltd. The Chinese company is ...

After a string of scandals, the European Commission has unveiled new plans to crack down on money laundering. It’s right to take this problem seriously — but its proposals are weak. Instead of setting up a new agency and equipping it to do the job, Europe plans to keep relying on national authorities, some of which aren’t up to the ...