Opinion

  The European Union is grappling with Uber and its peers, asking how best to regulate businesses that connect buyers and sellers in the so-called sharing economy. EU policy is shaping up to be much too heavy-handed. A big question for these new enterprises is whether the people supplying the services are deemed to be employees (with rights protected by ...

  US President Donald Trump held phone calls with five world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Trump and Angela Merkel discussed issues ranging from NATO to Russia to the situation in the Middle East. The conversation affirmed the importance of close German-American cooperation to each country’s security. Trump accepted Merkel’s invitation to attend the ...

  One of the least enviable jobs in the world at the moment has to be that of Indian finance minister. Arun Jaitley will present his fourth annual budget to India’s Parliament on Wednesday amid terrible headwinds — mostly caused by his government’s bewildering and disruptive decision to invalidate 86 percent of India’s currency last November. If he’s to revive ...

  Tough times lie ahead for Portuguese bonds. They were a euro area laggard last year, and 2017’s looking pretty poor. European Stability Mechanism Managing Director Klaus Regling said last week markets are “nervous” about Portugal’s debt level, financial sector and competitiveness. Portuguese yields had got low enough to suggest we were a long way from the bailout days of ...

  Kara Alaimo Earlier this month, US prosecutors announced charges against three former executives of the Japanese auto-parts maker Takata for allegedly falsifying data to cover up a deadly air-bag defect. The company has admitted to a 15-year cover-up, agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud, and will pay a $1 billion fine. Meanwhile, the faulty air bags have been ...

  President Trump’s slash-and-burn actions in his first week have been dramatic, but dangerously lacking in a consensus of support, even within his own administration. The risks were evident in the collapse of a planned meeting with Mexico’s president and in Trump’s embrace of torture tactics rejected by his secretary of defense and CIA director. Trump’s ‘tweet from the hip’ ...

  Indian bank investors are in for a rude shock, and one that’s got little to do with the chaos unleashed by demonetization. The fault lies in shareholders’ own expectations, which, in Morgan Stanley’s words, are driven by “institutional memory.” The top three Indian private-sector lenders by assets — ICICI Bank Ltd., HDFC Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd. — ...

  With Britain poised to quit the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May needs all the friends she can get. That helps explain her visit to White House, President Donald Trump’s first from a foreign head of state. The question is, what’s in it for him? Like so much else in the Trump era, this rapprochement is both unpredictable and, ...

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring most citizens from seven mainly Muslim Mideast and East African nations from entering the US. The nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia won’t be able to enter the US for at least 90 days. The order will deny visas to Syrian nationals and halts the processing of ...

  Nearly a decade after the global financial crisis, the recovery remains disappointing and nothing — neither massive fiscal stimulus, nor record-low rates, nor generous injections of liquidity by central banks — seems to be helping. Policymakers from Washington to London to Tokyo all seem to agree there’s only one answer left: structural reform. Everywhere there’s talk of amending tax ...