The European Union’s top antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, is closing out her term — possibly her last — with a $1.7 billion fine on Alphabet Inc.’s Google. She’d accused the search giant of abusing its market dominance to thwart advertising rivals. It rounds out a hat trick of fines against Google that resulted in clear changes to its business model, ...

The Federal Reserve’s policy makers left interest rates unchanged at their meeting this week, and the central bank’s new policy statement affirmed the “wait-and-see” approach unveiled by Chairman Jerome Powell in January. That didn’t stop many analysts greeting this uneventful announcement as significant. The reason was the Fed’s famous and increasingly confusing dot plot. Fed officials are right to be ...

Once the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put back in. China has discovered predatory online cash loans, and even an appearance on the state broadcaster’s annual consumer rights program is unlikely to eradicate the practice. In its two-hour special on March 15, China Central Television interviewed a woman whose debt ballooned to 500,000 yuan ($74,417) in just ...