There was no need for President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement to achieve his goal of overturning the Obama administration’s global warming policy. This had already occurred through court rulings and executive orders, which effectively halted higher vehicle fuel economy standards (up to 54.5 miles per gallon) and ended the Clean Power Plan program, ...

Uber is the San-Franscico-based technology company. It is also a transportation company. That may seem like a trivial distinction, but a lot is riding on it. And not just for Uber, but for every disrupter that fancies itself a technology company. Europe’s highest court — the European Court of Justice — will decide later this year whether Uber is more ...

The European Commission has been thinking about ways to strengthen the euro zone, and is proposing a plan for a new “sovereign bond-backed security.” Give the commission credit for putting its finger on an important defect of the euro-zone system. Unfortunately, its remedy falls far short. The defect is the so-called “doom loop” between governments and banks. Banks in Europe ...

Any rational, responsible business leader, faced with an existential threat to his enterprise, would take steps to manage the risk. With his decision to leave the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump is putting the lie to one of his central claims: that he would run the country like a business. The Earth is threatened with rising seas, violent weather ...

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker stretched credulity when he told the European Parliament he had known nothing about Luxembourg’s sweet tax deals with large companies; he’d served as finance minister and then prime minister as the small country struck the deals. What Juncker knew aside, one might ask whether there is any other way for small nations to survive among ...

When it comes to market volatility, don’t discount the influence of U.S. presidents. According to the Presidential Cycle Theory, the highest stock market returns are achieved in the third year of a new administration. Volatility, though, rises in the first year before peaking later on, as new policies work their way through markets. Since Donald Trump was elected in November, ...

In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley’s high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies. Liberalism, Trilling declared, was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America because conservatism was expressed merely in ‘irritable mental gestures.’ ...

Bloomberg Qatar’s markets received a battering as four of the country’s Middle East neighbors cut ties in a row over its stance on Iran and extremists. The nation’s dollar bonds tumbled and contracts used to bet the Qatari riyal will weaken the most since 2009. More than four times the daily average of shares changed hands on the key stock ...

Bloomberg No news is good news. At least for investors seeking stable returns, it’s better to buy companies that aren’t in the spotlight. To exploit a so-called low-volatility anomaly, the head of quantitative equity management at BNP Paribas SA invests in stocks that seldom get any attention in the media. “People are attracted by companies where they get a lot ...

Bloomberg The World Bank (WB) kept its outlook for the global economy unchanged, forecasting a modest pickup in growth despite uncertainty about monetary policy and the risk of a surge in protectionism. The development lender projects the world economy will grow by 2.7 percent this year and 2.9 percent the next, the same as its January forecast. “Global activity is ...