Big pieces of economic legislation tend to unleash the full power of unintended consequences. Consider Sarbanes-Oxley, the bipartisan law passed in 2002 in the wake of the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. It did what it was intended to do, which was ensure companies gave accurate accounts of their finances. But it has also led to debacles ...

Australia is still a continent, but it’s no longer an island. The country that was once immune to business cycles is being sucked deeper into the vortex of global monetary easing. That’s a measure of how pronounced and far-reaching the world economy’s downdraft has become. The Reserve Bank of Australia used to follow the US Federal Reserve in its monetary ...

For years governments have been discussing how to bring century-old international tax rules into line with modern business practices. A new proposal developed at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a think tank backed by industrial-country governments, is a big step forward. Under existing rules, multinationals have great leeway to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, with little regard ...