Inflation is back. What do we do about it? For starters: Don’t ignore it. The latest consumer price index (CPI) — the government’s best-known inflation indicator — reported a 2.9 percent increase from July 2017. The last time the year-over-year gain was higher was in December 2011. Though hardly a cause for panic, it suggests intensifying price and wage pressures ...

Analysts are trying urgently to evaluate the potential impact of a full-fledged trade war on the Chinese economy. This typically involves estimating how much various tariff scenarios will reduce China’s GDP growth, with current estimates ranging from the minimal, 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points, to the substantial — 2 percentage points. This is probably the right way to evaluate the ...

Getting two management teams to agree on a deal to create the world’s largest industrial gases group was hard enough. Finalising the combination of Praxair Inc and Linde AG is proving harder still. The former, in particular, should be asking if the benefits really are worth it. The possibility of a transaction surfaced in August 2016. An agreement to create ...