Opinion

  The upcoming Federal Reserve meeting will be the first since last month’s shock vote in Britain to leave the European Union. It is expected to hold rates even as traders hope for guidance on policy plans. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise as pledges are being made around the world to provide support to financial markets. The impact ...

  Mark Whitehouse Later this week, European regulators will report on stress tests designed to determine whether the region’s banking system could withstand a crisis. Judging from a separate indicator of financial strength, the truth is probably more than they can handle. The tests will focus on 51 banks in the European Union and Norway, subjecting them to an adverse ...

  A worrying trend is developing in the corporate bond market: Even with borrowing costs at or near their lowest ever, companies are increasingly unable to pay their debts. There have already been enough defaults around the world this year to suggest that the record set in 2009 might be beaten. And that should ring alarm bells for traders and ...

  On July 26, 1991, Manmohan Singh — then Finance Minister, and later Prime Minister for 10 years — rose in Parliament to deliver an address that would transform India. That speech, outlining the first budget of a just-elected government under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, launched India’s journey of economic reform, dismantling many decades-old socialist-style controls on the private ...

  Albert R. Hunt Hillary Clinton has been a national political figure for a quarter-century, longer than any presidential candidate. Yet contradictions and conflicting portraits of her persist. She is smart, well-versed in domestic and foreign-policy issues, revels in working things out and commands strong loyalty. She also is overly suspicious, insular, often nontransparent and disposed to cutting corners. She ...

  Christopher Balding When the Chinese appliance maker Midea Group announced a bid for the German robotics manufacturer Kuka AG this spring, it seemed like something of an omen. Kuka makes robots that specialize in assembling goods on a factory floor — exactly the kind of work that has lifted millions of Chinese out of poverty. After opening up to ...

  WASHINGTON It’s the revolution of rising expectations again. Watching Donald Trump last week, I thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher whose “Democracy in America,” published in the 1830s, remains the most insightful study of our national character. But it was de Tocqueville’s other masterpiece, “The Old Regime and the French Revolution” (1856), that came foremost to ...

  The pledge made by the world’s leading economies to do more to lift global growth to deal with fallout from Britain’s Brexit vote and counter dissatisfaction with globalisation is important. These will definitely reverse the slowing global economic growth. With the focus of the British leave vote, the Group of 20 nations hoped to see the UK as a ...

  Clive Crook Listening to Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican convention, and scanning the reaction to it, I have the sinking feeling that he might win in November. He’s extremely effective at what he does. His critics, on the other hand, are not. The speech was purest populism: nine-tenths grievances and empty promises, one-tenth stupid policy ideas. Yet the ...

  Despite China’s great power aspirations, its cyber warriors threw a fit after losing a legal battle to the Philippines in The Hague. Within hours of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s unanimous rebuke of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea last week, at least 68 national and local government websites in the Philippines were knocked offline in a ...