Opinion

A pattern has emerged in Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s response to various legislative bodies’ interest in his company. The more informed and pointed questions legislators want to ask, the less time Zuckerberg is willing to spend answering them. That should mean it’s probably time to stop asking and start acting in specific areas that have been adequately pinpointed ...

America’s government declares ‘war’ promiscuously — on poverty, on drugs, on cancer, etc. — except when actually going to war, which the nation has done often since it last declared war (on June 5, 1942, on Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary). But the incipient war du jour is being postponed. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the Trump administration is ‘putting the ...

The reaction to Target Corp.’s first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday is a near-perfect illustration of the enormous challenge many traditional retailers are up against in trying to satisfy Wall Street right now. By many measures, Target had a quite good quarter. Its comparable sales rose 3 percent over the same period last year, beating analysts’ expectations. That lift was powered ...

Eating too much added sugar has become one of the riskiest health behaviours in the modern world. None too soon, governments are waking up to the fact. Staggering under the burden of increasingly overweight populations, more than 30 countries have put new taxes on sugary beverages, most in just the past four years. This is good policy, and it needs ...

Is Mark Zuckerberg “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”? The comparison with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 lyrical ballad was invoked in the middle of a hearing in Brussels on Tuesday, where he faced questions from a handful of European lawmakers. In the poem, a wizard’s young apprentice is left alone by his master and enchants a broomstick. Before too long, he finds ...

We’re about two months away from elections in Pakistan — elections that are almost certain to be shrouded in controversy, one way or another. And, worryingly for Pakistan, it appears that the economy is weakening, just in time for the instability that might follow from the country’s turbulent politics. Under the outgoing government — led till last April by Nawaz ...

Wells Fargo & Co. has launched a series of advertisements meant to rebuild trust with customers. But the ads, to pull an image from Wells Fargo’s long-ago campaigns, are putting the wagon before the horse. Evidence of that is piling up. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo recently discovered that employees were improperly altering the documents of business ...

The long-awaited marriage of Standard Chartered Plc is a story of three decades of yearning that’s never found consummation. The latest potential suitor is Barclays Plc, which is reported by the Financial Times to be exploring a merger of StanChart. London-listed Barclays isn’t considering a possible deal, Reuters reported, citing two people close to the lender. In the event of ...

China, not the US, is the world’s largest economy. Though the US still tops when measured at market-exchange rates, China is about 20 percent larger after adjusting for the lower cost of goods and services there. The latter metric is what really counts, both in terms of standards of living and, probably, in terms of military purchasing power. With four ...

“Whatever it takes.” Those three symbolic words were uttered by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi in July 2012, and European bonds have benefited hugely from the “Draghi put” ever since. Italy has revived existential questions about the bloc. The latest twist in this drama looks to be the agreement between Five Star and the League on a prime minister, ...