Critics have called the resignation of India’s former central bank chief Urjit Patel and appointment of former Finance Ministry official Shaktikanta Das as his replacement a blow to the hard-won independence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Such fears are overblown. The changeover at the RBI is something else entirely: an opportunity to rebuild the central bank’s badly damaged ...

Whenever a Japanese company acquires an overseas asset, the rationale is typically that it’s finding a way to survive the country’s aging demographics and shrinking returns. But Hitachi Ltd’s 800 billion yen purchase of ABB Ltd’s power grid business is bigger than that. The Hitachi-ABB deal, while on the expensive side, is high-margin for the Japanese industrial conglomerate, and could ...

It seems like every asset bubble has a famous anecdote of someone claiming, right at the top, that a crash is impossible. In the stock-market bubble leading up to the Great Depression, it was economist Irving Fisher, who declared in the New York Times that stocks “have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few days before a ...