Bloomberg GLM Co., a Japanese automaker backed by former Sony Corp. Chief Executive Officer Nobuyuki Idei, said it’s close to winning its first deals to supply customized vehicle frames to companies seeking to produce electric cars. The Kyoto-based automaker is close to signing deals to supply vehicle platforms for about 10 carmakers, including some in China, founder and CEO ...

  Australia has a split personality when it comes to China: Government officials stress the importance of their strategic alliance with the U.S., even if it upsets Beijing. But business leaders argue that Australia must accommodate the reality of China’s overwhelming economic power in Asia. It’s an awkward straddle for Australia, as its security and economic interests diverge. “It has ...

Welfare reform may be the last great bipartisan success story. It was enacted in 1996 by a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich and by Democratic President Bill Clinton in response to decades of public frustration with the U.S. system of aid to the poor. At the time, the law had liberal enemies, some of whom resigned from Clinton’s administration ...

  When he talks about “rigged” elections and calls for voter-identification laws to prevent fraud, Donald Trump is squarely within the Republican mainstream. The party has made passing those laws one of its highest priorities in state after state. Yet as the evidence continues to show, the type of fraud that voter ID laws could prevent is basically non-existent. Now ...

  Investors are courting Africa like never before. The resource-rich continent, which has massive business potential, is turning into the new investment hub for many countries — with Japan and China taking the lead. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is set to unveil aid and development projects at a conference in Kenya this weekend. He will meet business leaders to ...

  Ronald Reagan famously summed up the logic of government thusly: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Uber and Lyft move, so naturally, the state of Massachusetts wants to tax them. And since taxis aren’t moving nearly as much as they used to, the state wants to hand ...

  Donald Trump made a seemingly momentous announcement on Monday, jettisoning a presidential campaign’s worth of assertions that he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants and close what he has repeatedly called an “open” border. Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who interviewed Trump, was obviously stunned. After telling Trump that the news media is “running wild with this,” he asked ...

I miss 2011. Looking back, that was the heyday of economic blogging. The financial crisis had abated, but the recovery from the recession was disappointing, and everyone was talking about how to jump-start growth. Macroeconomics was important again. Now, with the U.S. economy having returned to some semblance of normal, and with political threats looming, the finer points of macroeconomic ...

  Bloomberg Google is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece in virtual-reality films and programs, part of a plan to line up exclusive content for the debut of its new Daydream service in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Google will help promote projects from Hulu LLC and fund the production of 360-degree videos with ...

  Beijing / AFP China has unveiled illustrations of a Mars probe and rover it aims to send to the Red Planet at the end of the decade in a mission that faces “unprecedented” challenges, state media said on Wednesday. China, which is pouring billions into its space programme and working to catch up with the US and Europe, announced ...