The Federal Reserve has prepared investors for a small increase in interest rates this week, part of its effort to get monetary policy back to normal. The central bank should deliver the quarter-point rise the markets expect — but that isn’t all it ought to do. Investors’ attention is turning to a new question: What does the Fed intend to ...

Last week, as the shocking results of the British elections arrived, the most over-used sentence in Britain seemed to be: “I was wrong.” Another insurgent mass movement following Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star Movement in Italy had caused a political earthquake. In one of the biggest political upsets in ...

Akio Morita, the legendary founder of Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp., once declared that “America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.” In an influential 1991 book called “The Japan That Can Say No,” Morita and his co-author, conservative politician Shintaro Ishihara, alleged that the short-term thinking of U.S. companies would be their downfall. Constrained by shareholders more obsessed ...