Opinion

With Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, there’s a widespread belief that populism is on the rise in the developed world. Writers and thinkers darkly warn of a crisis if elites don’t accede to the demands — explicit or assumed — of the working class. As I wrote in a previous post, it’s very hard to define whom to ...

Wells Fargo & Co. is having a hard time pleasing anyone. At its annual investor day, the second-largest US lender by market value lifted the targeted annual savings figure from its cost-cutting program to $4 billion from $2 billion by the end of 2019. The move, which was flagged by analysts after hints from the bank itself, comes after Wells ...

Ask Australians what they hate about their big four banks, and you get a familiar litany of complaints. Borrowing rates are too high, and deposit rates too low. Profits — almost A$23 billion ($17 billion) in the most recent fiscal year — are obscenely fat. Slick sales types promote financial products to under-informed punters without disclosing the full risks. Other ...

The mystery at the center of the Michael Flynn case is why Donald Trump didn’t react sooner to warnings about Flynn’s involvement with Russia. Why didn’t Trump listen to President Obama’s caution against hiring him? Why did Trump wait 18 days before removing his national security adviser after urgent advice that Flynn could be ‘blackmailed’? We don’t have answers. But ...

Emmanuel Macron’s election as French president removes the risk that one of the founding members of the European Union might seek to extricate itself from the euro. That in turn should be the signal for equity investors to take advantage of a less febrile political environment and buy European stocks. After several years of underperformance, economic growth in the euro ...

His differences with US President Donald Trump may have helped win Moon Jae-in the presidency of South Korea. Now he and Trump need to focus on what unites them. During the campaign, Moon took issue with the U.S. administration’s approach to North Korea. In the past, he’s called for engaging economically with the North and restarting joint development projects, rather ...

US President Donald Trump has approved to directly arm the Syrian Kurdish forces in the fight to wrest back Raqqa, the self-declared capital of IS group. But Turkey, a US ally and NATO member, has criticized US plan as unacceptable and a threat to Turkey. Ankara says Syrian Kurds are linked to PKK militants in the country and supporting them ...

As they’ve guided China’s remarkable economic ascent over the last four decades, the country’s leaders have largely been content to focus on raising incomes and building factories. They’ve steered clear of messy international entanglements that could undermine economic progress, and with it the public support that keeps them in power. Over the past decade, of course, a richer, more confident ...

Most of us remember the time before smartphones were in the pockets and purses of billions of people. Before those gadgets became the primary computer for millions of people. Before the smartphone boom made fortunes for some companies — Apple and Facebook, for example — and doomed others. That all happened in less than a decade. That is stunningly quick. ...

Per-capita electricity use peaked in the US in 2007. With the exception of a post-recession rebound in 2010, it has declined every year since. I already wrote a column about this epochal shift last month, but the chart that went with it is so remarkable that I’m going to recycle it here. What caused the decline? I offered several possible ...