Opinion

  Have you ever been to a bazaar, where a hawker offers something at a special price, “just for you?” The world of online retail is getting ready to take the practice to a whole new level — and it doesn’t take much speculation to see how things could go terribly wrong. Let’s start offline. There are tons of rules …

  WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange’s revelation last week of the CIA’s arsenal of hacking tools had a misplaced tone of surprise, a bit like Claude Raines’ famous line in “Casablanca”: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” The hacking community, of which WikiLeaks and the CIA’s cyberwarriors are both aggressive offshoots, has been invading and …

  Indian mining billionaire Anil Agarwal wins a gold star for boldness. His timing? “Could do better.” During the depths of the mining industry’s debt panic in January 2016, a 2 billion pound ($2.5 billion) investment in London-listed Anglo American Plc would have secured him more than two-thirds of the stock. Today, after a commodity price rebound and Anglo’s deleveraging …

  When President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that his predecessor had tapped his phones, he created something of a metaphysical crisis. No one — not the Justice Department, not Congress and least of all the president himself — seemed able to ascertain the truth about the accusation. Now that they’ve had some time to look into it, what do …

  The American diplomatic dichotomy couldn’t have been starker as far as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s approach towards North Korea is concerned. On the one hand Tillerson said North Korea has nothing to fear from the US or its allies. On the other hand, he suggested that US military action against North Korea was an option. Tillerson is on …

  Should you trust economists? For many people nowadays, the answer is “no.” Economists failed to predict the Great Recession. Their prescriptions — quantitative easing, for example — didn’t seem to help speed the recovery much. During the past three decades, a lot of their big policy ideas — financial deregulation, tax cuts, privatization and the free movement of capital …

  Even Inditex SA can’t defy gravity forever. The Spanish owner of the Zara fashion chain is still delivering the sort of sales growth rivals can only dream about. Same-store sales rose 10 percent in the year through January, the fastest rate in 14 years. By contrast, many competitors are struggling to generate growth on the same basis. But the …

  China is nothing if not creative in protecting its local industries. Although it has liberalized its economy in recent years, it has also erected a sophisticated set of barriers to safeguard companies it views as national champions. Increasingly, this is a counterproductive approach. The usual method of assessing protectionism is to look at metrics such as tariff rates. And …

  What we learned from the latest ‘score’ by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of Obamacare and the Trump administration’s ‘repeal and replace’ plan is what we should have known all along. To wit: If people have health insurance, they will use more health services — visits to doctors’ offices, more tests, procedures and drugs — and health spending will …

  India’s generic drug-making industry is getting wheeled out of intensive care. But is it really going home? The US Food and Drug Administration this week lifted the import ban on a factory that Mumbai-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. inherited as part of its takeover of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. The plant, in Punjab state, became the third owned by Ranbaxy …