Millions of small investors have piled into India’s stock market in recent years, eager to build wealth by betting on the country’s economic growth. Catchy advertising and easy-to-open online trading accounts have wooed young people and retirees alike, demystifying investing and fueling the exuberance. This week, many of those investors got a rude shock —…
A major Western leader announces an unorthodox economic policy, panicking the financial markets, driving down the country’s currency and fueling a blizzard of warnings about the dire long-term consequences. President Trump did all this with his across-the-board tariffs, announced last week, but before him, there was Liz Truss, Britain’s former prime minister, with her rollout…
Last week’s “Liberation Day” marked a kind of D-Day in the effort to reorder the international economic system. That reordering is desperately needed to address the system’s imbalances, which have led to deindustrialization and annual trillion-dollar trade deficits for the United States. But remember, far from striking World War II’s decisive blow, D-Day was just…
The call of a conch shell roused the dolphin hunters from their beds. Under moonlight, the six men shuffled to the village church. There a priest led them in a whispered prayer, his voice barely audible over the sound of crashing waves; the tide was high that day. Saltwater pooled in parts of the village,…
Britons are bracing for a burst of higher inflation for much of this year as many household bills jump next month, a revival of the cost-of-living pressures that have squeezed household budgets in recent years. Next month, the average annual energy bill is set to rise 6.4 percent as the price cap resets. Water bills,…
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary pioneered many of the themes dear to conservatives in the United States, railing for years against “migration insanity,” “the woke virus” and “gender madness.” Now Mr. Orban is engaged in an effort that veers away from the orthodox conservative view that the state should stay out of the economy:…
President Trump fueled new speculation this week about a meeting with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, when he told reporters that Washington needed to be cleaned up to prepare for a summit between the two leaders in the “not too distant future.” Mr. Trump provided no details, and China has said nothing publicly about any…
Britain’s center-left government outlined plans on Tuesday to curb spiraling welfare costs as it attempts to juggle a difficult set of competing objectives: saving public money, incentivizing work and protecting the most vulnerable. The announcement follows weeks of tense internal debate within the governing Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, about how to…
The German Parliament is set to vote on Tuesday on a plan to loosen government borrowing limits in order to spend heavily on defense and infrastructure, in an effort to offset America’s pivot away from Europe and to lift the country out of years of economic stagnation. If the measure eventually becomes law, it will…
Investors watching the S&P 500’s plunge this week are processing a mix of signals. Will the threat of tariffs push the economy into a recession or is this simply a retrenchment from the highly valued technology companies that some analysts and investors argued were due for a pullback? There is a different stock index that…