Now that Christine Lagarde has announ-ced her resignation as managing director of the International Monetary Fu-nd, German chancellor Angela Merkel says Europeans “again” have a “claim” to fill what is arguably the world’s most important economic job. Merkel is invoking a decades-old political deal, which gives Europe the IMF leadership in return for allowing Americans to run the World Bank. ...

China’s bond market has been eerily quiet lately. Over the past year, investors in China’s US dollar bonds had gotten used to the idea of defaults. As early as 2015, the government started allowing some state-owned enterprises to renege on their commitments, a painful but welcome step that helps differentiate healthy firms and troubled ones. But there hadn’t been a ...

Slimming down appears to be paying off for Novartis AG. CEO Vas Narasimhan has refocussed the Swiss pharma giant around drugs by selling off eye-care business Alcon and its remaining consumer-health inte- rests. Second-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations and a big guidance boost showed the benefits of the strategy. Shares hit an all-time high in early trading even ...