Opinion

President Donald Trump invoked ‘America first’ by pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, promising to revive the coal industry and repeatedly tweeting himself as the author of the 105-month-old bull market. The nation’s top money manager of 2017 took the opposite path to becoming No. 1 and says it’s better to be lucky than smart. He embraced ...

Bitcoin has had a terrific year overall, thanks to a small but dedicated set of believers in the disruptive power of cryptocurrencies who have also enabled many other individual investors to participate in the eye-popping phenomenon. Yet after bitcoin’s value fell by more than a third in just a few days last week, and as exchanges struggle to cope with ...

Timing is everything. Hobbled by an aging population and negligible interest rates, Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. is keen for growth and sees overseas expansion, particularly in Southeast Asia and the US, as key. In its moves to acquire 73.8 percent of PT Bank Danamon Indonesia, it may just succeed where DBS Group Holdings Ltd. failed. Indonesia now is ...

The world’s central banks recently signed off on the Basel III rules for bank capital. The new system, years in the making, is a step forward: It will make banks stronger and safer. But there are several loose ends. One of the most important concerns the treatment of sovereign bonds on banks’ balance sheets. Banks that hold large, concentrated portfolios ...

With 2017 mostly said and done, it’s instructive to put the bond market in perspective so we know what to reasonably expect in 2018. Recall that at the start of the year there was no shortage of calls for the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note to soar to 3 percent — or even 4 percent — by ...

Apple Inc. says it’s more resilient than a typical hardware company. This is more hype than reality, but I can’t ignore the potential upside if Apple is serious about web video, digital music, and its other internet-centric software. Technology watchers know that Apple has been stressing how many people who own iPhones, Macs and iPads are also buying from its ...

The onset of a new year brings plenty of predictions, and so I will hazard one: Many of the biggest events of 2018 will be bound together by a common theme, namely the collision of the virtual internet with the real ‘flesh and blood’ world. This integration is likely to steer our daily lives, our economy, and maybe even politics ...

It’s hard to find controlled experiments in finance. But they exist. East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Chile and Venezuela. In crossing a border, you can immediately see the difference in economic output and financial well-being from one country to the next, based on variations in tax and regulatory policy. The same goes for within the United States ...

The stock market is at a record high. Investors are chasing a handful of hot stocks. Geopolitical tensions threaten to upend the rally. I’m referring, of course, to 1972. The S&P 500 Index closed at a record high of 119.12 on December 11. It was the height of the Nifty Fifty (not to be confused with the Nifty 50 Index ...

The real loser in Catalonia’s referendum was, of course, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. He needs to make sure that his country’s bond market doesn’t follow suit. The regional election he demanded resulted in the three separatist parties winning 70 out of the 135 seats. But the pro-independence parties did not win an overall majority of votes, and forming a ...