The stock market is a weighing machine of companies’ potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon. Amazon.com Inc. has briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It’s a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon’s market cap is six ...

Europe’s national regulators are discovering the limits of their ability to police cross-border money laundering in a complex and globalized financial system that’s full of holes. As incomplete and imperfect as the region’s banking union may be, more supranational oversight and co-operation would help. The severity and complexity of corruption probes hitting supposedly humdrum, diversified consumer-and-business banks should be a ...

You have to make your own luck, allegedly, but it really helps when stuff just goes your way. And it really really helps if you can somehow combine favourable vagaries with a little fortune-engineering of your own. Such alchemy is practiced in the c-suites of an industry with a Vegas-like affinity for the lucky: oil. Intuitively, bosses get paid well ...