Everyone is wondering when China will return to work. While it may be tempting to consider past epidemics or labour strikes to gauge how quickly that could happen, the industrial shutdown from the coronavirus is looking more like a natural disaster than anything else. It may even get worse. Chinese industrial activity remains severely depressed. One tracker shows an even ...

The prospect is tantalising: the Boeing Co. versus Airbus SE battle, but for the 5G era. Nokia Oyj, the Finnish telecommunications equipment firm, is contemplating asset sales and merger options, Bloomberg News reported. That raises the prospect of joining forces with Swedish rival Ericsson AB, thereby creating a European behemoth to compete more effectively with China’s Huawei Technologies Co. A ...

Monetary-policy specialists are furiously exploring ways to improve central banks’ effectiveness, particularly should economies fall into a recession — a risk heightened by the coronavirus’s cascading economic stop. The underlying policy motivation is the growing recognition that prolonged and excessive reliance on central banks has reduced the power of both conventional and unconventional measures; it has even risked making them ...