In a trade war, as in a real one, people are wounded by friendly fire from their side. Consider some casualties in Donald Trump’s “easy to win” — his promise — trade war. Begin with the company whose green machines bear the name of the blacksmith who, in the 1830s in Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a self-scouring plow that could ...

Investors have been looking for reasons to forgive Xiaomi Corp. for its post-IPO slump. They don’t appear to have found them yet. Shares of the Chinese smartphone maker reversed a 2.1 percent gain to plunge as much as 5.5 percent in Hong Kong after the company posted second-quarter earnings. They’ve dropped 47 percent since the July 2018 listing. The stock ...

In France, they call it taking mustard after dinner. In Germany, they talk about a child having already fallen in the well. In England, they speak of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. They all are good ways of describing how regulators have tended to deal with the world’s biggest tech firms. But when it comes to ...

Post-Brexit, the UK will have a historic opportunity to strike a trade deal with one of the world’s fastest-growing regions and prove that it can shed European red tape and protectionism. The key is to rethink the European Union’s policy on palm oil. In 2017, the European Parliament approved a resolution to phase out and eventually ban biofuels made from ...

If UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson seems rather glib about the idea of his country crashing out of the European Union without a deal — an outcome that myriad authoritative bodies have predicted will be highly costly for the UK economy — it is most likely because there is something he fears more than that. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is ...

The US Federal Reserve has developed a pretty poor track record for meeting its inflation and employment goals. If it wants to do a better job, it should follow Canada’s example and set some deadlines. More than four decades ago, Congress mandated that the Fed’s monetary policy pursue two objectives: price stability and maximum employment. In January 2012, the central ...

First they came for central banks, then they came for government bonds, then they came for rich depositors. Then they came for me. Negative interest rates are coming for us all, in one form or another, as central banks redouble their efforts to avert a global economic slowdown that threatens to unleash deflation. So how can we defend ourselves from ...

Bloomberg Any reassurance markets got from the Federal Reserve in Jackson Hole was wiped out within minutes. A volley of acrimonious presidential tweets and a nastier turn in the trade war sent Treasury yields, stocks and the dollar skidding into the weekend. Hopes that the central bank could guide markets to a cool-headed assessment of the US economy now look ...

Bloomberg As markets bet on a no-deal Brexit, the real shock for pound traders could be Prime Minister Boris Johnson clinching a sudden deal. Sterling has tumbled in recent weeks as Johnson’s “do or die” stance has led traders to increase bets against the currency on the prospects of a no-deal Brexit on October 31. Yet a surge of nearly ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG executives were outraged. They had just missed out on a major deal with the Russian government and wanted answers. “We must use whatever tactic and political pressure to avoid this embarrassment,” a senior banker in London wrote in an email to the firm’s top executive in Russia. “DB not participating is a slap in our face.” ...