Sydney / AFP The owners of a Chinese ship that ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef in 2010 agreed to pay Australia Aus$39.3 million (US$29.6 million) on Monday, in a settlement dismissed by conservationists as “woefully inadequate”. The fully-laden coal carrier Shen Neng 1 hit a shoal in April 2010, leaking tonnes of heavy fuel oil and threatening ...

  Beijing / AFP China’s banking sector could be facing an imminent debt crisis, a global central bank watchdog has warned, fuelling fresh fears about a blowout in the world’s number two economy that could hit the world economy. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — dubbed the central bank of central banks — said a gauge of Chinese debt ...

  Seoul / AFP Hanjin Shipping Co., the South Korean container line that sought bankruptcy protection last month, received a court advisory to return all chartered vessels to cut costs while the company is in the midst of reducing its fleet. Giving the ships back to the owners makes sense as they were chartered at high rates, a spokesman at ...

  This week, much attention will focus on the Open Market Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the most powerful central bank in the world, whose actions have global impact. Yet the most informative, and intriguing, policy decision could take place in Tokyo. And the outcome will not only tell us more about Japan’s daunting challenges, but could also signal ...

The big guns are coming out in the battle over infrastructure spending. Larry Summers, a celebrated Harvard economist and veteran policy adviser, has a new article making the case for spending more. Ed Glaeser, a brilliant and versatile colleague of Summers’ who studies urban economics, has an article making the opposite case. Though both make many good points, I think ...

During the past two years, we have seen signs that wage pressure is building as the economic recovery grinds on. Enough evidence has now accumulated to suggest that it is already happening. The latest data, courtesy of the Census Bureau, which released its annual update on incomes and poverty yesterday, showed that median household income increased a whopping 5.2 percent ...

  Two back-to-back stinging defeats have rattled German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The internal splits are palpable now. Even though Merkel has dropped the “we can do it” rallying cry on migrants, she has refused to put a cap on migration. This is a bold and righteous move, but to convince her coalition partners about her stand ...

  From Erie in the west to Scranton in the east, Pennsylvania is flecked with casualties the stubborn economic sluggishness and relentless globalization have inflicted on industrial communities. But in this middle-class Philadelphia suburb, Tom Danzi knows that the economy is denting even his business repairing damaged cars. His Suburban Collision Specialists once had 27 employees kept busy by drivers ...

  For many years, China’s authorities took a Goldilocks approach to housing prices: They wanted a market that was neither too hot nor too cold, and took measures as needed to control prices. Although an explicit asset-price target was never announced, it was widely assumed that the government wanted home prices to grow in line with the rate of economic ...

  In the years since the 2008-09 financial crisis, cracks have appeared in the global hegemony of neoliberalism. The pressure to favour free markets and reject the social-welfare model has moderated somewhat. In the U.S., President Barack Obama succeeded in installing the first general health-insurance system in the country’s history. Thus Washington has moved closer toward the European welfare state ...