Opinion

  In 2018, German government officials war-gamed a massive natural-gas shortage. With the real thing looming, the lessons are sobering. Some hospitals, nursing homes and jails were forced to close; companies shut; livestock was left to die; hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished; rationing for households was imposed, according to the official account of the crisis-management exercise. In just a ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is failing so spectacularly, it’s making him even more dangerous. Running out of ways to de-escalate while saving face, he appears to think that he has no choice but to escalate. What will that look like? His problem is that his failures are becoming too obvious to hide even for Russia’s propaganda machine. He attacked Ukraine ...

Forget the basement window. Boeing Co has somehow managed to fall out of a dungeon. Some three years after a second Boeing 737 Max crashed and prompted a worldwide grounding of the best-selling jet, not a quarter has passed without some kind of fresh bad news out of the planemaker. The release of first-quarter results was no exception. Boeing burned ...

  The green energy revolution is making greater progress than expected. Solar and wind power have seen exponential cost declines, and electric vehicles seem to be a market winner. That’s all good news, but improving green energy is not the same as addressing climate change. There is good chance that even optimistic projections for green energy will come true — ...

  Any doubt that the Bank of Japan is comfortable with a weak yen should now be eliminated. The central bank is effectively doubling down on the trademark super-easy monetary stance it began developing decades ago — just as the Federal Reserve and its peers become more aggressive in raising rates. In a statement after its policy meeting, the BOJ ...

Call it poor judgment or bad luck, but India’s expansion of natural gas coverage to more than 90% of its population couldn’t have come at a worse time. In January, Adani Total Gas Ltd and others won keenly contested licenses to add new areas to city gas networks; in February, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, billions of dollars in investment ...

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Elon Musk tweeted after clinching his $44 billion takeover of the social-networking platform. What about nondemocracies, though? If there is one government that has reason to welcome Musk taking control of Twitter Inc, it ...

Digital finance is booming, with the value of cryptocurrencies outstanding reaching more than $2 trillion from almost nothing a decade ago — almost entirely without regulatory oversight to protect investors and the broader financial system. This is not likely to end well, unless officials intervene in a thoughtful way. So what should they do? One option is to avert disaster ...

As if there weren’t enough problems right now, the world is facing the threat of an oil embargo. No, not black gold — red gold, better known as palm oil. Prices gyrated after Indonesia, which produces about two-thirds of the global crop, promised to halt exports of the deep-orange edible fat to calm domestic food prices in the run-up to ...

It’s been more than a decade since the euro area’s last interest-rate increase, but this year will very likely finally see one again. Banks, lost in a desert of ever weaker interest income, are desperate for the small rewards that a couple of hikes will bring. But there are stark risks that higher borrowing costs and a slowing economy may ...