Opinion

  UK Parliament gave Prime Minister Theresa May the power to trigger Article 50, a formal process to withdraw from European Union. She is expected to send the letter to begin the process by the end of March. European Union Bill reached UK Parliament to be discussed after House of Commons and House of Lords battled over the bill’s contents, ...

  Jordan Weissmann, a writer at Slate, has an interesting article about Republican proposals to replace entitlements with private savings accounts. He says that these programs are big giveaways to money managers, who would collect hefty management fees. Weissmann says that the GOP is ‘trying to rewrite the social contract in such a way as to maximize the profits of ...

  In selecting AIA Group Ltd.’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Tucker as its new chairman, HSBC Holdings Plc has gotten the right guy. Let’s hope the bank’s rather insular culture gets him. To understand why HSBC has gone outside its fold for the first time in its 152-year history, take a look at AIA’s profitability. The insurer’s stock has more ...

  It’s never smart to keep hungry people waiting for their food. They turn ‘hangry.’ No one has mastered this idea better than Chinese takeout restaurants, which have put a premium on speed ever since they emerged in the 1800s. That’s when a wave of Chinese immigrants came to the US and opened up cheap and cheerful restaurants catering to ...

  Rex Tillerson is off to an agonizingly slow start as secretary of state. That matters, because if Tillerson doesn’t develop a stronger voice, control of foreign policy is likely to move increasingly toward Stephen Bannon, the insurgent populist who is chief White House strategist. Tillerson’s State Department has been in idle gear these past two months. He doesn’t have ...

  The odd thing about India’s stock market rally is just how little faith investors have in it. The Nifty 50 Index is barely 2% away from its all-time intraday high, but unlike the S&P 500 Index, which has closed at records 13 times this year, the Indian benchmark is struggling to break free of scepticism. Given the froth in ...

  Chinese President Xi Jinping seems interested in embracing the role of global steward — champion of the liberal political and economic order the U.S. administration seems uninterested in promoting. Now is his moment to prove he’s serious. China’s erstwhile client North Korea has become an urgent threat to stability — Xi’s stated top priority — from one end of ...

  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clinched a landslide victory in key state elections that are seen as a referendum on the performance of Modi’s three-year-old government. BJP won 311 out of 403 seats in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. The historic verdict would boost Modi’s chances of winning another term as India’s prime minister in ...

  To committed readers of the financial press, it was almost impossible to miss the proclamations that a milestone had been passed: The bull market, as of yesterday, was eight years old. For a sampling of examples see this, this, this, this, this or this. This formulation is wrong, since it misconstrues the definition of a bull market. Rather than ...

  Global asset markets may not be taking Janet Yellen’s warnings on rate increases too seriously, but Singapore got Fed-ready with the surprise announcement that the city is easing property curbs. Starting in 2009, those restrictions on buying, selling and financing real estate came in waves of increasing severity after Singapore found its open economy inundated with cheap money printed ...