Opinion

  The trigger of Article 50 is the event traders have been waiting for since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. Yet as Prime Minister Theresa May approaches her end-March deadline for launching Brexit, there is no consensus on what it means for markets. The pound has slumped 18 percent and the country’s benchmark equities index has rallied ...

  Encouraging developments are as welcome as they are rare in colleges and universities that cultivate diversity in everything but thought. Fortunately, state legislatures, alumni and philanthropists are planting little academic platoons that will make campuses less intellectually monochrome. One such, just launched, is Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. A primary mission of institutions ...

  Bank stocks often act as proxies for political risk, as well as economic barometers. When a government starts shaking or a recession looms, financial shares may be the first to suffer. If you trust bank analysts, that paradigm is about to change. Financial institutions in countries with high political risk have seen some of the steepest positive earnings revisions ...

  Now that a court has ousted her from office, former South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s troubles are only beginning: She could face indictment on charges of bribery and abuse of power. Koreans, however, need to move beyond this lurid scandal. Months of uncertainty over Park’s fate have paralyzed her nation at a critical moment. Koreans have been riveted by ...

  A week ago, Germany stopped campaign events by Turkish ministers who wanted to address more than 1.4 million voters living in the country. Now, the Netherlands blocked Turkish Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya from attending a political rally. Sayan Kaya had arrived in the Netherlands from Germany but was prevented from entering Turkey’s diplomatic compound ...

  By BMW AG’s high standards, 2016 wasn’t great. While it was a record year in terms of sales, the profit margin of its car business was the lowest since 2010 at 8.9 percent. The company missed analysts’ estimates, and the share price dropped. So CEO Harald Krueger’s decision to reaffirm the firm’s “Automated, Connected, Electrified and Shared” strategy raised ...

  European Central Bank President Mario Draghi knows he’ll eventually have to end the central bank’s bond-buying program and raise interest rates. But he’s rightly determined, no matter how much pressure Germany brings to bear, to keep that day as far in the future as possible — which makes the rest of this year a non-event for euro zone policy ...

  In the past two weeks, the Chinese government granted President Donald Trump 38 valuable trademarks. They come as tensions between China and the US have cooled somewhat, leading to suggestions that the award is a poorly concealed quid pro quo designed to reward a president with considerable personal business interests. On Tuesday, Senator Ben Cardin went so far as ...

  A major factor behind the soaring growth of risky wealth-management products in China is that investors typically think the government stands behind them. Lately, nervous regulators have been emphasizing that this isn’t so. But they’ll have to do a lot more to change expectations in a state-dominated economy. Wealth-management products are short-term, high-yielding investments that are issued by banks. ...

  A new sentiment washed over investors immediately after the U.S. presidential election in November. Traders started to believe in a new narrative of reflation, a marked shift from the many months of talk about deflation and persistent slow economic growth. They piled into inflation-protected securities and bought riskier assets. They projected higher commodity prices because big economies were suddenly ...