Opinion

These days, nobody wants to be a British supermarket. Tesco Plc, the UK’s biggest grocer, is buying wholesaler Booker Plc, while J Sainsbury Plc last year snapped up catalog retailer Argos. As for Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc, it is building its own wholesale business using the manufacturing facilities that already make about half of its fresh foods. The only one ...

Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping directed his government to build a new city for the “millennium to come.” It would rise on rural land about 60 miles south of Beijing, guided by the principles of “ecological protection and green development.” And it would become a model for a new kind of urban expansion. It was an attractive vision. Over ...

On Tuesday night, a few hours after President Trump’s sudden announcement that he was firing FBI Director James Comey, a prominent Republican politician gave me this simple, blunt assessment of the Trump White House: “These guys scare me.” Trump’s impulsive, vengeful decision to dump Comey has scared a lot of people. It suggests a pent-up anger and lack of judgment ...

The investment metric on which Indian banks appear most eager to ape their Chinese peers is the price-to-truth ratio. While investors know better than to take the People’s Republic’s published bad loan ratio of 1.74% at face value, they have been reasonably certain that Indian lenders are more honest, following a 2015 review of asset quality by the central bank. ...

Britain’s new relationship with the European Union is still a long way from being settled, but Brexit has started a process that is bound to hurt the City of London. Earlier this month, the European Commission launched a review of the rules governing one of the City’s lucrative lines of business — the clearing of derivatives denominated in euros. The ...

North Korea test-fired yet another ballistic missile on Sunday in a stark defiance of United Nations sanctions and US warning that a policy of patience was over. It was a new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12. It came days after South Korea’s newly elected president Moon Jae-in vowed to engage with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The missile ...

At a victory rally for France’s young new President Emmanuel Macron outside the Louvre last week, I was struck by the generational gap between the candidate and his most animated supporters. Most younger people in the crowd looked relieved but far from overjoyed; the most visibly enthusiastic among them were of West African or Arab descent. And when Macron took ...

It was fun while it lasted. For a few quarters, it seemed as though the bond-trading business was back in force, with trading volumes accelerating to records on the heels of a flood of new debt sales and more uncertainty about the US economy. Most of the big US banks enjoyed better-than-expected earnings in the first three months of the ...

The trans-Atlantic flight could soon become a gadget-free zone if U.S. officials press forward with a security ban on laptop computers and other larger electronic devices on airline flights from Europe. Carriers are bracing for operational chaos at European airports after the Department of Homeland Security said last week it might expand to Europe a ban imposed in March on ...

Globalization has gotten a bad rap. The Trump White House associates it with all manner of economic evil, especially job loss. The administration has made undoing the damage a central part of its economic strategy. This will almost certainly fail and disappoint, because globalization’s ill-effects have been wildly exaggerated. A new report shows why. It comes from the Peterson Institute ...