Without a doubt, the European Central Bank is the euro zone’s most powerful policy-making institution: It sets monetary policy for 19 member states and supervises the bloc’s most important lenders. Even so, the failure of a Latvian bank shows that the ECB doesn’t have all the powers it needs. Gaps remain, and they put Europe’s financial system at risk. At ...

Presume not that China is the thing it was. That’s certainly the message Premier Li Keqiang intends to convey with his promise to cut levies on imports. Almost simultaneously, Bloomberg News reported that the Trump administration will impose tariffs on as much as $60 billion of Chinese products as soon as this week. Have the world’s great protectionist and its ...

It’s now safe to say that the US economy is in a boom. Small business leaders are saying it. Measures of business optimism, tracked by the National Federation of Independent Business, are at all-time highs. These heady survey measures haven’t yet been matched by hard data, but the hard numbers are looking good too. Business investment as a percent of ...