Opinion

  Unless Vladimir Putin rapidly comes to his senses and pulls out of Ukraine, Russia is on the verge of being cast out of the international capital markets for a very long time. Any bondholders still invested in the nation’s debt are on their own. The Russian government has tried to maintain payments to its creditors, but the US Treasury’s ...

Emmanuel Macron is within striking distance of a historic re-election as French president after clinching a first-round lead against his far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen. Investors should be relieved, but not complacent. Round two on April 24 will be a close-run affair. Early results show France’s establishment parties in tatters. An increasingly fragmented electorate is looking for new answers after ...

Oops. Looks like Elon Musk isn’t joining Twitter Inc’s board after all. Less than a week after Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal excitedly tweeted that the world’s richest man would get a seat, he’s now been forced to backpedal after saying Musk declined the offer. Musk was supposed to take up his post, Agrawal wrote in a memo subsequently posted ...

  Chase UK has many finance folk scratching their heads. Britain doesn’t need another online-only bank. It already has a host of scrappy upstarts making little headway against a handful of dominant traditional lenders. So why is JPMorgan Chase & Co spending time and money pursuing UK customers? If it wins a couple of percentage points of market share, the ...

  The central bank needs some new tools to navigate the unique challenges that are likely to confront the euro-zone economy. The war in Ukraine has left Europe facing both greater supply chain disruptions and higher prices for raw material, problems exacerbated by the region’s dependency on Russia energy. Against this backdrop, the European Central Bank (ECB) must find a ...

Reflected glory is often the best way to come by extra kudos. And so Boris Johnson has been basking in Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s praise for his firm stand against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The prime minister has now doubled down on his support. As well he might. The war has saved Johnson’s leadership from a sense of downward drift. The question ...

Walmart said it will pay its entry-level truckers $95,000 to $110,000 a year, which is 26% higher than what it previously paid and approximately even with what a junior banker on Wall Street might make even with their advanced degrees from an Ivy League institution. This is sure to upset junior bankers, who are probably putting in a lot more ...

  Focused on war in Europe, the administration of President Joe Biden has paid comparatively little attention to the US’s relations with Africa. Yet deeper US engagement with the planet’s most youthful and fastest-growing continent is essential to global stability. Biden can both meet Africa’s needs and advance US security interests by focusing on the biggest threat to Africa’s future: ...

  Industrial demand is still robust, but many more yellow lights are flashing for investors than there were even just a few weeks ago. The first-quarter earnings season unofficially kicks off next week with industrial distributor Fastenal Co, whose results can often be a harbinger when its manufacturing customers report later this month. Last we heard from Fastenal, the company ...

Last weekend saw the re-election of the man often thought of as Europe’s proto-Putin: Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has attacked his country’s democracy while seeking to weaken the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) from within. Yet Orban should be careful whom he emulates. If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent performance is any indication, he ...