A year ago, with the election of a US president who had fulminated against the international trade and financial systems, some analysts worried that the engine of global prosperity might soon be sputtering. But that’s not what happened. The global economy has surged forward this year, significantly outperforming expectations. As the International Monetary Fund wrote in its latest world economic ...

Masayoshi Son to the rescue. It helps to have the SoftBank Group Corp. founder on your side when Chinese regulators are raining on your IPO party. Lufax, the online wealth manager that’s among the world’s biggest start-ups, has hired five banks to work on a Hong Kong initial public offering of as much as $5 billion, according to IFR. SoftBank’s ...

Amid resurgent nationalism and talk of nuclear war, it’s been a rough year for global diplomacy. So a 10-party agreement to protect the waters of the planet’s far north qualifies as a minor miracle. For the next 16 years, commercial fishing will be prohibited in the central Arctic, a Mediterranean-sized patch of icy ocean more than 200 nautical miles from ...