Opinion

  These are tough times for Theresa May on the road to Brexit. The prime minister is facing a rebellion from lawmakers in her own Conservative Party over her secrecy about strategy, while her lawyers had a difficult first day as the Supreme Court began considering if she or Parliament has the right to start the exit talks. A Labour ...

  It sounds like something out of a dystopian novel: The fresh fish in many of Beijing’s biggest supermarkets simply disappeared last week, as if summoned to another realm. Social media buzzed with alarm and paranoia. The Beijing News placed a photo of an empty aquarium and an underemployed fishmonger on its front page. The truth turned out to be ...

  Have you watched that new video of Amazon Go, the store in test mode in Seattle where you just pick up stuff (prepared food and drinks, mostly) and walk out? I have, again and again. It’s pretty hypnotic, especially with the sound off. The gist of it, in case you don’t feel like watching right now, is that you ...

  How China manages its currency is likely to be the global economic story of 2017. Despite the government’s best efforts, capital continues to leave the country at a brisk pace, with a balance-of-payments deficit through the third quarter of $469 billion. Attempts to arrest this flow probably won’t work. But they may well create new risks. Capital outflows began ...

  Last month’s Circles drama highlights the struggle Jack Ma’s empire faces in expanding its financial services business. To recap, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and its affiliate Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co. added social features to Alipay’s smartphone app to help promote engagement. In theory, more engagement should lead to greater use of its marquee function, ...

  There’s new data out on the taxes that people and corporations in the world’s affluent nations paid in 2015. The US total tax burden of 26.4 percent of gross domestic product (that includes state and local taxes) once again lands us pretty far down in the rankings. Of the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ...

  The embattled Korean President Park Geun-hye defies pressure to resign. But the scandal-hit Park is ready to accept the result of looming and possibly lengthy impeachment process. The scandal that has served a body blow to Park and crippled the government pertains to her friendship with long-time confidante Choi Soon-Sil. Dubbed as female Rasputin, Choi has been charged with ...

  Matteo Renzi came to power promising to change Italy or change his job. On Sunday, Italians made that choice for him, rejecting the constitutional reform on which he’d staked everything. It’s tempting to plot a continuous line from the UK’s June vote to leave the European Union through to the election of Donald Trump to the Italian referendum on ...

  The emphatic rejection of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s proposed constitutional reform returns Italy to a state of political and economic uncertainty. As Renzi prepares to hand in his resignation, President Sergio Mattarella must establish whether the governing Democratic Party is stable enough to support another prime minister as he seeks to avoid the early election that could open the ...

  Here are two things I’ll bet most people don’t know about Greece. The country’s just-appointed minister of economy and development, Dimitri Papadimitriou, was lured away from his position as head of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College in America. He’s not a member of the ruling Syriza party. And the man appointed secretary general for public revenue in ...