Opinion

Anyone who doubts China could produce the next Roche Holding AG or Pfizer Inc. need only look at the country’s cancer figures: More than 4 million new patients or close to 12,000 per day diagnosed in 2015, the latest public data available. Global investors have settled on a favored contender in Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co., whose Shanghai-traded shares have surged ...

Wells Fargo & Co.’s $1 billion settlement with regulators already has some saying that this marks the end of a troubled period for the scandal-plagued bank. That might be wishful thinking. Part of the reason for the optimism is the size of the fine. Wells Fargo paid only $185 million for its fake-account scandal, which impacted as many as 3.5 ...

Taking stock of the global economy as finance ministers and central-bank governors gathered in Washington for its spring meetings, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found reason for concern. “[R]isks beyond the next several quarters clearly lean to the downside,” it reports. Well, that’s hardly unusual — the IMF exists to be concerned. Rarely, though, has it had better grounds. To ...

To many economists, the solution to India’s bad-loan crisis appears as obvious as the problem: Privatize state-owned banks, which have racked up billions more in soured loans and performed much worse than their private-sector counterparts. Yet, unless the government first strengthens its ability to supervise all banks, public and private, selling some of them off will be slim guarantee against ...

Outside of Britain it’s commonly assumed that the country regrets its decision to leave Europe. Indeed European Parliament Brexit Representative Guy Verhofstadt suggested recently that one day the UK might rejoin the EU. It’s also a view some inside Britain cling to as well; and yet there’s very little evidence to support it. Ever since the Brexit vote in June ...

Since 1993, the year before the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) went into effect, per capita gross domestic product in Mexico is up about 26 percent in real terms. That’s a lot better than the outright decline in per capita GDP that the country had experienced over the course of the 1980s. But it’s nowhere close to the 41 ...

Threatening tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump has provoked swift vows of retaliation from Beijing, shaken financial markets, and generated great uncertainty and confusion. Long before China started to run huge trade surpluses against the US, he ranted against American trade partners. Other countries, he claimed in 1999, “can’t believe how easy it is to deal with the ...

Bank of America Corp. (BofA) CEO Brian Moynihan pledged in his recent letter to shareholders to keep the bank on the path of “growing responsibly.” The question is whether keeping Bank of America straight has narrowed its profits too much. The first quarter appeared to support that. Bank of America said that its quarterly earnings per share rose nearly 38 ...

Sterling is back into its pre-Brexit referendum range versus the dollar, quite an amazing achievement from the depths of Brexit despair in late 2016. While dollar weakness has driven all the major currencies stronger, some of the fire under sterling has been driven by the Bank of England’s recent desire to raise rates. That desire, like many things in life, ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it expects the global economy to expand 3.9 percent this year and next, a forecast that is unchanged from January estimates. That’s the good news for markets. The bad news is that there was something much more important in the IMF report this quarter: caveats about risks related to protectionism and global conflict. Given ...