Opinion

Imagine India’s GDP growth had collapsed to 3%; inflation was about to hit double digits; exports were tanking; and the country’s twin deficits—in the government’s budget, and in the nation’s current account—were out of control. It’s only when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tries to imagine such a dire scenario for March 2019 that its simulation exercise for bad ...

Securities, or not securities. That is the crypto question. Except in Thailand. While regulators around the world have grappled with the issue of what category digital currencies and assets fall into, Thailand has skipped the debate altogether. Instead, using an emergency decree that came into effect earlier this year, authorities wrote an entirely new law. The result is the Digital ...

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond and Bank of England chief Mark Carney are a two-man Brexit juggling act, valiantly trying to convince the outside world that they can keep the UK from crashing to earth. The duo have survived political mud-slinging by Brexiteers, a faltering economy and heavy criticism of deep cuts to public spending (Hammond) and historically ...

If Amazon’s move to disrupt health care is going to make Americans any healthier, the improvement is most likely to take place in the business of getting prescription drugs to patients more reliably. For one thing, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Failure to take prescription drugs kills about 125,000 Americans a year, according to a recent review in the ...

Being a banker in London is probably the very definition of belonging to “the 1 percent.” Yet only one in three is satisfied with his or her pay, according to one survey. Considering the stagnant productivity in the city’s finance sector, perhaps they should be more grateful. Britain as a whole has been a productivity laggard since the financial crisis, ...

Since January 1, when China stopped accepting the rich world’s recyclable plastic waste, it’s gotten a ton of criticism for worsening the already deep crisis of ocean plastic pollution. But China isn’t the only culprit here. This is a crisis made — and growing worse — throughout developing Asia. Just eight countries in the region are responsible for about 63 ...

Virtually all economists favour free trade. But we differ as to what the costs of trade restrictions might be. The decision of Harley-Davidson Inc. to shift more production overseas to Europe to avoid the impact of new tariffs presents a good opportunity to assess those costs – and the good news is that, so far, the economic costs of a ...

The sun is setting on the second quarter, and not a moment too soon for Deutsche Bank AG. In 90 days, the German lender has replaced its CEO, promised thousands of job cuts, seen its credit rating downgraded, and watched its share price plumb new depths. Flunking the US Federal Reserve’s stress tests was a final humiliation, albeit an expected ...

The US Department of Agriculture has come up with cheerful new labels for genetically modified foods (GMOs). The bright green and yellow circles depict a happy sun, a winking smiley face or a verdant landscape stamped with the letters “BE,” for “bioengineered” — rather than the familiar “genetically modified” or “genetically engineered.” It’s a shame the government is unwilling to ...

Brexit worries may be damping sentiment in Europe but in Asia, real-estate investors don’t appear too concerned. While Chinese purchasers of London property have put away their wallets as capital controls bite, buyers from Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea are picking up the slack. Victor Li, who succeeded his billionaire father Li Ka-shing as head of the CK group ...