Opinion

Sometimes, the wrong person for the job has the perfect background. HSBC Holdings Plc might confront that issue if its approach to Peter Hancock results in the former American International Group Inc. boss being picked to replace Stuart Gulliver as chief executive. A duo of Mark Tucker, the incoming chairman, and Hancock as CEO would give HSBC its first leaders ...

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised a dramatic departure from the recent past. France’s youngest leader since Napoleon has brought in on his coat-tails a new generation of fresh-faced young leaders, many of whom have never held political office before. And in his debut speech to both houses of France’s parliament, Macron reiterated his call for a new order — ...

On the second floor of a 24,000-square-foot, used-goods superstore in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Koji Onazawa pauses beside some old Japanese surfboards. He’s spent nearly two decades at Bookoff Corp. — a corporate legend in Japan that’s barely known outside it, with 832 secondhand shops across the country. Now he’s running Jalan Jalan Japan, the company’s first true foray ...

Could China, the world’s largest automobile market, help address the threat of global warming if it went completely electric? The answer isn’t as obvious as it seems. China has been making great strides toward electrification. Electric vehicle sales are booming: Consumers bought more than 300,000 last year, and more than 5 million are expected to be on the road by ...

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, major central banks adopted extraordinary measures to stabilize the global system and revive growth. These measures included the maintenance of near-zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve for seven years, and a quintupling of its balance sheet over that period through bond purchases. This process, known as quantitative easing, was also a key ...

This is the summer of our discontent. As Americans celebrate July 4, they are mad at their leaders, mad at their government and mad at each other. A recent Pew poll finds that ‘public trust in government remains near historic lows.’ Just 20 percent of Americans trust the government to ‘do the right thing just about always or most of ...

Wall Street banks, struggling with years of declining revenue from Asia, will be hoping two market-opening measures by China at the weekend finally spell a return to boom times. They’re likely to be disappointed. HSBC Holdings Plc’s achievement in becoming the first foreign bank to control a mainland securities joint venture, coupled with the launch of China’s bond-connect program with ...

Japanese investors had a torrid time in the lead up to the French elections, offloading about 3 trillion yen ($26.5 billion) of French government bonds. But with net buying of the overseas notes in seven of the past eight weeks, according to Japan Ministry of Finance data, could they be returning? The recent jump in 10-year European bond yields provides ...

President Donald Trump has always had a weakness for simple and fantastical fixes. Illegal immigration? Build a wall. Jobs moving overseas? Tax imports. Unemployment in Appalachia? Dig more coal. Rising medical costs? Repeal Obamacare. Trump’s gift for simple slogans served him well as a candidate. As president, however, it is failing him and endangering the country. When the Supreme Court ...

China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hong Kong coincided with the official start of the China Bond Connect program with Hong Kong that gives offshore investors another way to access the mainland’s $10 trillion debt market. Although the link between China’s mainland and offshore bond markets may look ceremonial, for the People’s Bank of China it could help set the ...