Opinion

John Flannery has one less reason to keep General Electric Co. together. The 126-year-old company and last original member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was dropped from the index last week and will be replaced with drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. GE’s place on the benchmark index had been an open question for some time now as a ...

The largest US banks have just cleared the first hurdle of this year’s Federal Reserve stress tests, demonstrating that they have enough loss-absorbing capital to survive a hypothetical crisis. Now, investors are waiting to hear how much of that capital the banks will be allowed to pay out in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. They should be careful ...

US President Donald Trump rode to power declaring that China had twisted the world trading system out of shape — and plenty of people around the world murmured in agreement, if very quietly. The first shots in Trump’s trade war, however, have been indiscriminate. His steel and aluminium tariffs are the equivalent of firing into a curious crowd of onlookers. ...

No responsible investor should own Facebook Inc. shares, according to the head of sustainable investing at the biggest bank in the Nordic region. That’s an unjustifiable overreaction. Sasja Beslik, who runs Nordea Bank AB’s sustainable finance unit, made the call to divest this week after Cambridge Analytica used data from as many as 87 million users of the social network ...

UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently announced that the country’s crisis-ridden National Health Service (NHS) will receive an additional 20 billion pounds at today’s exchange rate by 2023. In normal times, that sort of decision might have followed a public discussion of how much the nation should spend on health care and where the money should come from. But this ...

President Donald Trump and the Democrats can’t agree on anything, except one big thing: China. After the administration announced plans on June 15 to impose tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports, Charles Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, called the decision “on the money.” That was a startling statement on a startling fact: China has few friends left in Washington, ...

While everyone else is watching the World Cup, biotech bankers are keeping busy. This week will bring a bumper crop of baby biopharmas into the market, with seven expected to go public in the US — the most in more than three years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes companies working on cutting-edge medical research, from potentially ...

Grab Holdings Inc. seems pretty pleased with itself at nabbing a $1 billion investment from Toyota Motor Corp. The idea isn’t new, but this is the biggest financing by a car company of a ride-hailing service. Grab ought to be wary of such largess in a deal that looks a bit like vendor financing. The Southeast Asian startup needn’t be ...

US President Donald Trump may sincerely think he’s battling to win Americans a better deal on trade with China. In fact, he’s making a better deal harder to achieve — and threatening to inflict grave economic damage on the US economy in the process. In the past few days, Trump has dramatically cut the chances of a negotiated solution to ...

Many question whether the European Union has the raw power – as well as the willpower — to engage in the trade war President Donald Trump has started with much of the rest of the world. But the matter is more complex for Europe than who can emerge victorious from an exchange of blows. A purely economic cost-benefit analysis would ...