Britain’s latest retail sales report won’t save Christmas. The volume of goods sold in stores and online jumped 1.4 percent in November compared with October, according to the Office for National Statistics, smashing through the 0.3 percent forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Excluding fuel, the increase was 1.2 percent. Black Friday discounting seems to have played a big ...

Fourty years ago, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched the most dramatic economic transformation in history by encouraging his countrymen to “emancipate” their minds and “seek truth from facts.” The reforms that followed — he called it socialism with Chinese characteristics — were stunning in their impact. China’s GDP today is more than 80 times bigger than it was at the ...

Why do you call them shadow banks? That’s a criticism I’ve heard often since I started chronicling the troubled world of India’s nonbank finance companies following the high-profile bust of infrastructure lender IL&FS Group in early September. Some readers saw the characterisation as an attempt to equate India’s pedigreed financiers of mortgages and consumer loans with China’s peer-to-peer lenders and ...