It’s a good conservative principle that where possible, the government should recover the cost of its services from the people who use them, rather than from taxpayers at large. It’s also pretty uncontroversial that the government must oversee financial markets, to ensure that they are free and fair. It thus makes sense that the government should charge a user fee ...

Earlier this month, my colleague Elisa Martinuzzi suggested that merging Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG would, on paper at least, create a European banking champion. She concluded, though, that the regulatory obstacles to such a deal would probably be insurmountable. But there is a three-way combination that could create a regional lender with the heft to take on ...

In a week defined by the prospect of fresh monetary stimulus around the globe, the country sending the loudest signal may surprise you: Indonesia. In the months after the Federal Reserve’s January pause in rate increases, Bank Indonesia remained extremely cautious, weighing low inflation against its bugaboo, the current-account deficit. Now, the central bank is unambiguously hinting that cheaper money ...