State technological, geopolitical and social objectives are the driving force behind what could be China’s biggest-ever telecom merger. Shareholders celebrating the deal might do well to remember that. Shares of China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. surged after Bloomberg News reported that top leaders were reviewing a proposal to merge their state-controlled parents. The Hong Kong-traded units ...

The stock market is a weighing machine of companies’ potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon. Amazon.com Inc. has briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It’s a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon’s market cap is six ...

Europe’s national regulators are discovering the limits of their ability to police cross-border money laundering in a complex and globalized financial system that’s full of holes. As incomplete and imperfect as the region’s banking union may be, more supranational oversight and co-operation would help. The severity and complexity of corruption probes hitting supposedly humdrum, diversified consumer-and-business banks should be a ...