Opinion

Doves on the Federal Reserve evidently have a vocal ally in President Donald Trump. He said recently that he’s “not thrilled” about the Fed increasing interest rates — a move the central bank is expected to signal this week, without yet doing so. The president’s concern comes at the same time that interest rate watchers are getting nervous about how ...

If it’s really out with the old at John Flannery’s GE, then its arcane and vague approach to reporting earnings needs to go. Flannery has rolled out a bold transformation plan to shrink General Electric Co’s eight major business units to four and vanquish the bureaucracy that’s been stifling the 126-year-old congl- omerate. Many assumed this refresh would include a ...

The highest-valued stock in the S&P 500, based on this year’s expected earnings, is not Amazon.com Inc, Netflix Inc or any other member of the FANG bloc. In fact, none of the tech megacaps, which also include Facebook Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc, even rank in the top 10. Hess Corp, an 85-year-old oil company, with a forward P/E ...

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker cannot be looking forward to his meeting with Donald Trump. He knows there’s little hope of making the US president see sense on trade. (Trump confirmed on Twitter that “tariffs are the greatest.”) But Juncker can avoid making a bad situation worse, and with luck even suggest a way out of this mess. The EU ...

It’s easy to be outraged about multinational corporations’ shifting of profits to tax havens, but much harder to figure out how to stop them from doing it without hurting the economy. Evidence exists that curbing tax avoidance opportunities makes these firms move actual jobs, not just accounting profits, overseas. In a recent paper, Thomas Torslov, Ludvig Wier and Gabriel Zucman ...

Verizon Communications Inc closed the books on a critical quarter. The company named its next CEO, shut down its latest experiment in a string of failed mobile-video services, geared up for its rollout of 5G network service, and watched with insouciance as its three closest rivals — AT&T Inc., T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. — took bold steps on ...

Green bonds are a fast-growing financial instrument, with annual issu- ances of less than a billion dollars a decade ago having grown to more than $170 billion last year. They’re increasingly popular as a way to fund environmentally friendly infrastr- ucture, energy efficiency and clean energy. As the market grows, an intriguing split is emerging between green bond markets: Asia ...

The prospect that the UK would leave the European Union without a deal setting out the terms of the withdrawal once seemed laughably remote. When it was mentioned at all, it was mainly as a negotiating tactic aimed at securing favorable trade and tariff agreements between the UK and the EU. Even when Prime Minister Theresa May uttered the mantra ...

UBS Group AG has kicked off the European banks’ earnings season after a quarter hit by fears of a global trade war, rising market volatility and slower economic growth. For all the jitters, expectations may be set too low. The Swiss bank didn’t do too badly amid the gloom: net income rose 9 percent to 1.28 billion Swiss francs ($1.29 ...

With a trade war intensifying, industrial machinery giants are making investors anxious. It’s not all bad. After what looked like an incipient downturn, orders for Japanese machine tools — a keenly watched da-taset — rose 11 percent in June from a year earlier, figures showed last week. Demand from home and overseas totaled close to 160 billion yen ($1.4 billion), ...