Opinion

Indian banks are being hit with one disaster after another. They are already dealing with a bad-loan problem that’s close to a crisis—and which caused India’s largest bank to declare a quarterly loss for the first time since the beginning of the millennium. Some of the loans that have gone bad—such as those to the flamboyant liquor magnate Vijay Mallya—already ...

The election of President Emmanuel Macron in France last spring increased the odds of a unified European economic policy. He has expressed interest in moving to pan-European fiscal policy measures, eventually leading to pooling debt across countries under a common finance minister. The events of recent weeks have nudged the region in this direction. Developments in Italy and Spain — ...

What goes up, must come down. What goes up fast must come down even faster. Except Hong Kong property, perhaps. The breakneck growth of China’s private-sector conglomerates has gone into reverse as authorities recoil at the buildup of debt their overseas shopping sprees have caused. The degree of pain inflicted by that great unwinding depends on the assets being sold. ...

Pharma’s pricing power just isn’t what it used to be, and it’s probably not going to recover any time soon. Pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Express Scripts Holding Co. last week reported a record-low 1.5 percent increase in drug spending by commercial health insurance plans in 2017. It also said per-beneficiary drug spending fell for many commercial plans and gave a ...

Ignore the flim-flam, and President Donald Trump is offering some good ideas with his infrastructure proposal. The question is whether it’s too little, too late. Broadly, the plan envisions spending $200 billion to stimulate investment by states and businesses, with a goal of restoring roads, bridges and so on. It also aims to simplify regulation. With customary modesty, the White ...

Remember “war”? That thing where countries would gather up a bunch of people, give them weapons, and have them slaughter each other and pillage the countryside? For most of the past 3,000 years, war was a more-or-less constant feature of human life. Psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, chronicles the ...

Can recycling save the world from a looming shortage of cobalt? The idea has sound precedent. Lead — an essential ingredient in traditional car batteries, just as cobalt will be for the coming generation of lithium-ion cells — is probably the most extensively recycled industrial raw material on earth. With cobalt demand from cars, electric buses and utility-scale batteries set ...

From the cab of Rodney Terry’s state-of-the-art John Deere cotton stripper, harvesting cotton seems like the easiest job in the world. We chug along at 4 or 5 miles an hour, watching the giant machine’s bright yellow fingers gobble up eight rows of bolls at a time. White rows magically turn brown as we pass over them. Then comes the ...

China’s biggest tech companies are emblems of national pride. When the government decides upon a priority, Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc. are often asked to help devise the technology to achieve it. The companies are generally spared from official criticism, let alone interference with their commercial operations. Those privileges aren’t absolute, however, as Tencent recently ...

The markets may have had bigger things to worry about last week than the Bank of England’s statement that interest rates will rise earlier than previously expected. But they were still stunned by the announcement. Such a hawkish turn would make perfect sense under normal circumstances; inflation is above the bank’s target and there is no sign that the global ...