Opinion

US economic data releases this week fell short of consensus expectations and markets have been lowering their expectations of a Federal Reserve hike. That means there will be even more attention on the employment report for July, which will be released Friday. What is most needed—for Main Street, for Wall Street and for an orderly normalization of Fed policy—is a ...

Britain and France announced last month the death of the internal combustion engine, both scheduling it for 2040. Their ban on gas- and diesel-powered cars may only accelerate a process already well on its way, but it will help reduce the future effects of climate change and pollution now. The trend towards electric vehicles is coming from both government and ...

Oil producers who for years tracked top OPEC member Saudi Arabia to help set the price of their crude could now be looking to go solo. With $100 oil a distant memory and US crude eating into their share of prized markets, they are seeking new ways to assess if their supply may be worth more—a prospect that’ll help prop ...

It’s hard to be a Canadian auto-parts bull when US car sales are falling, Nafta negotiations are about to start and the loonie is rising, but there are reasons for investors to hold their nerve. No subsector of the S&P/TSX Composite Index has generated more consistent outperformance when bond yields are rising, according to Matt Barasch, Canadian equity strategist at ...

Once upon a time, the battle for the crown of world’s biggest automaker was a one-horse race. Since overtaking Ford Motor Co.’s sales in 1931—not that long after the last Model T rolled off the production line—General Motors Co. was the undisputed global market leader for the best part of eight decades. In 2008, Toyota Motor Corp. pulled ahead, before ...

Here’s a contrarian thought: President Trump had the right instinct to insist that China help resolve the nightmare problem of North Korea. A peaceful solution is impossible without help from the other great power in East Asia. As Trump nears the threshold of a military crisis with North Korea, he needs to sustain this early intuition—and not be driven into ...

Husam Zomlot does not have an easy job. He is the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s representative in Donald Trump’s Washington. And despite Trump’s early promise to seek the ultimate deal to bring peace to the Holy Land, his administration is focused on more pressing matters. Zomlot’s biggest problem these days is a piece of legislation named for Taylor Force, a former ...

Central banks are born to lead. When they start following commercial lenders or asset prices, the message for investors is that the authorities have lost the plot. That’s what is happening with the Reserve Bank of India, which on Wednesday cut its repurchase rate by a quarter percentage point to 6 percent two days after State Bank of India preemptively ...

As the Brexit process lurches from one drama to the next, dominating UK politics, media and business decisions, traders have grown immune to noise surrounding the country’s departure from the European Union. The British pound is trading near the highest in a year versus the dollar as attention turns instead to headwinds for the greenback. Sterling has even held its ...

The United Nations paid at least $18 million last year to companies with close ties to Bashar al-Assad, some of them run by cronies of the Syrian president who are on US and European Union blacklists. Contracts for telecommunications and security were awarded to regime insiders including Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin. UN staff ran up a $9.5 million bill at ...