Opinion

The rising US dollar and higher interest rates are pummeling emerging markets. Foreign investors who rode the big rally in these markets in 2016 and 2017 see little reason to stick around and are leaving en masse. This shift will probably persist since dollar-denominated obligations make up some 75 percent of the trillions of dollars in developing-economy debt. True, cheaper ...

Real estate is the driver of the Chinese economy. By some estimates, it accounts (directly and indirectly) for as much as 30 percent of gross domestic product. Keeping housing prices buoyant and development robust is thus an overriding imperative for China — one that is distorting policymaking and worsening its other economic imbalances. Despite reforms in recent years, there’s little ...

Rescuing a dying bank with taxpayers’ money is often the only way to prevent a costlier contagion. But nursing a deposit-taking institution by tapping life-insurance premiums of policyholders? That’s like allowing a localized infection to spread all over, hoping the natural immunity of an otherwise healthy body will help beat back the germs. India’s plan to sell a majority stake ...

A pattern is emerging in the war between the European Union’s antitrust authorities and US tech companies. The changes that Google and Apple made after adverse rulings and large fines appear to be little but window-dressing, and left intact the problems the penalties were intended to solve. In June 2017, the European Commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros for giving ...

A bright banner at NATO’s lavish new headquarters here proclaims the core conviction of the trans-Atlantic alliance: “We are together. We are strong.” But the words seem a bit hollow these days, as President Trump escalates his attacks on America’s traditional European partners. Trump’s “America First” policies have shaken many of the nations that looked to Washington as their ally ...

The UK Labour Party’s plan to set the Bank of England a productivity target must rank among the worst ideas ever conceived for a central bank. It runs against pretty much everything economists believe should be the role of a monetary authority. And it would amount to an outright admission of defeat by elected politicians, whose task it is to ...

It certainly appears dovish that the European Central Bank (ECB) expects to reinvest even more of its maturing holdings next year, as Bloomberg News reported. It’s even more so if, as President Mario Draghi has suggested, officials relax the rules on how much time they can take to make reinvestments — more flexibility here gives them room to smooth ructions ...

The government must be ecstatic, and the prime minister’s tailor even happier. Greece has secured a much more generous than expected deal that should allow it to put its bailout behind it and let Alexis Tsipras put on the tie he promised to forgo until the country’s debt woes were over. But there remains one sticking point: whether the country ...

When European Union (EU) heads meet at the end of this month, they are likely to issue a warning to bureaucracies and firms to step up preparations for a no-deal Brexit, also known as a ‘hard’ or ‘cliff-edge’ Brexit, because that’s where things appear to be heading in the talks between the EU and the UK. At this point, it’s ...

There are few places for investors to hide when a global trade war is about to erupt and the US Treasury yield curve threatens to invert. Japan may be one. The nation’s stock market has been relatively calm this year, with the Topix index down less than 2 percent in dollar terms. This is noteworthy considering a third of revenue ...