Opinion

The morning after is always when reality hits. Reading the news headlines about China’s recently minted sovereign bond, one could be forgiven for thinking President Xi Jinping’s moment in the capital markets has arrived. The government’s $1 billion of 10-year notes were priced just 25 basis points over Treasuries, with the spread narrowing to less than 10 basis points Friday ...

Catalonia’s declaration of independence from Spain, passed by the Catalan parliament on Friday, is a largely symbolic gesture as far as true independence goes. It will, however, require all of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s experience and skill to defuse this situation. These last couple of days, I’ve been in Barcelona trying to make sense of the complex game that’s ...

Russia’s cybermeddling in the 2016 US presidential election has been accompanied by what US and European experts describe as a worrisome Kremlin campaign to rewrite the rules for global cyberspace. A draft of a Russian proposal for a new ‘United Nations Convention on Cooperation in Combating Information Crimes’ was recently shown to me by a security expert who obtained a ...

In view of the deepening Brexit gloom ahead of the meeting, last week’s amicable European Union summit was moderately encouraging: At least the talks didn’t break down. Both sides ought to understand, however, that when they meet next time, moving to actual trade negotiations is essential. Instead of negotiating the shape of their future trade arrangements, Britain and the EU ...

Along with its Silicon Valley brethren, Facebook is scrambling to respond to pressure from Congress about the flood of fake news and bogus political ads on its site. The deluge is also doing great damage, it’s worth pointing out, far from Washington. Facebook’s fastest-growing markets are in the developing world, where the problem of fake news is even more devilishly ...

If there is anything to be gained from President Donald Trump’s ‘disgraceful’ attack on the credibility of the widow of a US Special Forces soldier killed in Niger, it’s that Americans are finally becoming aware of the expanding US mission against extremist violence now spreading across the Sahel region of Africa. As Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford explained ...

People tend to like big, sweeping theories of economic history. When Karl Marx foretold a supposedly inevitable series of class conflicts and revolutions that would end in a communist utopia, the idea was so powerful that it inspired revolutions, alternative economic systems and wars. Other thinkers depicted economic history as the triumph of a particular culture, or the inevitable ascendance ...

After three years of hand-wringing, India has finally done the right thing by its struggling banks. The 2.1 trillion rupees ($32 billion) capital infusion into state-run lenders announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday evening has been well received by rating companies, despite its unconventional structure. As much as 1.35 trillion rupees will come from banks’ own resources. The ...

Zhou Xiaochuan, the long-serving and respected governor of the People’s Bank of China, raised eyebrows last week when he cautioned that the country could have a ‘Minsky Moment’ if “we are too optimistic when things go smoothly.” Although he was right to warn against policy complacency and general economic overconfidence, particularly in the context of a growth model that still ...

The NAFTA war is heating up. It’s a confusing conflict because perceptions are driven by political rhetoric, not economic reality. NAFTA, of course, stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has eliminated most tariffs among the United States, Mexico and Canada. During the campaign, candidate Donald Trump denounced NAFTA as a bad deal for the United States. He ...