Opinion

  By BMW AG’s high standards, 2016 wasn’t great. While it was a record year in terms of sales, the profit margin of its car business was the lowest since 2010 at 8.9 percent. The company missed analysts’ estimates, and the share price dropped. So CEO Harald Krueger’s decision to reaffirm the firm’s “Automated, Connected, Electrified and Shared” strategy raised …

  European Central Bank President Mario Draghi knows he’ll eventually have to end the central bank’s bond-buying program and raise interest rates. But he’s rightly determined, no matter how much pressure Germany brings to bear, to keep that day as far in the future as possible — which makes the rest of this year a non-event for euro zone policy …

  In the past two weeks, the Chinese government granted President Donald Trump 38 valuable trademarks. They come as tensions between China and the US have cooled somewhat, leading to suggestions that the award is a poorly concealed quid pro quo designed to reward a president with considerable personal business interests. On Tuesday, Senator Ben Cardin went so far as …

  A major factor behind the soaring growth of risky wealth-management products in China is that investors typically think the government stands behind them. Lately, nervous regulators have been emphasizing that this isn’t so. But they’ll have to do a lot more to change expectations in a state-dominated economy. Wealth-management products are short-term, high-yielding investments that are issued by banks. …

  A new sentiment washed over investors immediately after the U.S. presidential election in November. Traders started to believe in a new narrative of reflation, a marked shift from the many months of talk about deflation and persistent slow economic growth. They piled into inflation-protected securities and bought riskier assets. They projected higher commodity prices because big economies were suddenly …

  The European Council, which includes leaders of EU member states, normally issues a consensus document at the end of each meeting. On Thursday, it failed to do so because one member — Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo — refused to approve it. The spat tells us something about the rocky future of a multispeed Europe. Szydlo’s snub had nothing …

  You knew it all along: Economists can’t forecast the economy worth a hoot. And now we have a scholarly study that confirms it. Better yet, the corroboration comes from an impeccable source: the Federal Reserve. The study compared predictions of important economic indicators — unemployment, inflation, interest rates, gross domestic product — with the actual outcomes. There were widespread …

  The economist Kenneth Arrow, who died last month at age 95, was a model academic — brilliant, creative, precise, unfailingly modest. If only his fellow economists would stop misrepresenting his work. In the 1950s, Arrow and others proved a theorem that, many economists believe, put a rigorous mathematical foundation beneath Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. The theorem …

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just one of many federal agencies marked for drastic funding reductions to enable a big boost in military spending. But the cuts proposed for America’s center of weather and climate research reveal alarming pitfalls in President Donald Trump’s approach to budgeting: a reluctance to invest in the future, a disregard for …

  At last, what South Koreans accomplished was least expected. The country’s Constitutional Court removed President Park Geun-hye from office in a unanimous 8 to 0 decision. The court’s decision marked the most stunning downfall for the South Korea’s first female leader. The ruling allows possible criminal proceedings against 65-year-old Park and makes her country’s first democratically elected leader to …