Opinion

It’s hard to recall the last time there was good news out of Deutsche Bank AG. Record fines and criminal charges. Restructuring plans with layoffs and write-offs, that don’t seem to work. Losses. Senior management infighting. Credit-rating downgrades and new lows for the stock price. Added to a US list of troubled lenders. Only three of the 33 equity analysts ...

Is President Trump’s pitch to disgruntled manufacturing workers a leading political indicator, portending future trends, or a lagging one, appealing to a small and declining segment of the public? We may be about to find out, thanks to Trump’s controversial tariff plan. Trump’s decision last week to levy duties on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico seems, ...

For all the talk of China’s mountain of debt, defaults and deleveraging, there’s a chasm nobody is talking about. Here’s an alarming and frequently cited statistic: Chinese industrial companies have at least $124 billion of debt maturing over the next two years. Actually, it’s worse. They have another $34 billion of bonds with put options – giving creditors the right ...

Never before has a US president worked so hard to isolate his country from its friends. The G-7 summit of advanced economies that started on Friday in Quebec sees Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK united in opposition to Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policy. The problem goes deeper than a first round of tariffs and counter-tariffs, because Trump’s ...

While the turmoil in Italy has died down, at least for now, the issue that set it off is sure to provoke more tumult ahead. The populist coalition that won the last election had proposed to make Paolo Savona, an economist who has said Italy should have a “Plan B” to exit the euro, finance minister. Sergio Mattarella, the country’s ...

When Narendra Modi took office as India’s prime minister just over four years ago, a top priority for the economic reformers who had supported his candidacy was the privatization of India’s incredibly inefficient public sector. Among their biggest targets was the state-run airline, Air India — a clunky, loss-making behemoth that has long been rendered irrelevant by buzzy domestic competitors. ...

Imagine you run a hotel group that’s just sold a controlling stake in its property portfolio so it can pursue a fashionable “asset-light” strategy. What’s the most logical way to deploy some of the 4.6 billion euros ($5.4 billion) of capital released by that transaction to maximize investor returns? Maybe not buying a chunky stake in a strike-prone, heavily indebted, ...

It doesn’t feel all that long ago that Australian banks were the envy of the world. In March 2009, when stress-testing of US financial institutions drove the final spasm of the previous year’s credit crisis, you could have bought all the shares in Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Barclays Plc with their $8.4 trillion of gross ...

European leaders will meet in Brussels at the end of June to discuss how much deeper to push the euro zone’s monetary union. While there’s been plenty of hype about the summit, it risks being a disappointment. Most of it will just confirm what’s already been agreed. And, in typical European fashion, many big questions will remain unresolved – until ...

Remember how there was a glut of computer chips in 2008, and then the world stopped using computer chips? Yeah, me neither. That’s a good reason to discount your worries about the effects on solar power from recent policy blows on panel manufacturers by the US and Chinese governments. The falls in the share prices of some major producers have ...