Americans are in the final sprint of a record year of e-commerce spending, filling their digital carts with holiday gifts and decor in a year when public health concerns are keeping them away from stores. That online haul, though, foreshadows an unfortunate aftershock for retailers: A potentially unprecedented deluge of merchandise returns. Online purchases have long had higher rates of ...

A long overdue antitrust push is gaining steam. But it’s focusing on large technology companies like Facebook Inc and Google-parent Alphabet Inc, which present complex problems that classic antitrust approaches won’t always solve. The cases are based on very standard stuff. The US Justice Department is accusing Google of illegally preserving its dominant market share in search and search advertising ...

This week offered another illustration of a dual policy dynamic in the US that has been undermining both short- and longer-term economic prospects for the past few months: too limited a response for necessary fiscal measures and pro-growth structural reforms and too much reliance on monetary policy tools that are close to, if not already past, the point of limited ...