Opinion

  Plenty of M&A deals have destroyed value for the acquirer’s investors but few have done so quite as quickly, or egregiously, as Westinghouse Electric’s purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster Inc., a U.S. nuclear construction business. On Tuesday, Westinghouse’s parent company Toshiba Corp. said a reassessment of the $229 million deal, announced barely a year ago, might oblige it …

  The notion that we’re getting worse at generating big, world-changing ideas has been gaining currency. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote earlier this month: Outside of personal technology, improvements in everyday life have been incremental, not revolutionary. Houses, appliances and cars look much like they did a generation ago. Airplanes fly no faster than in the 1960s. …

  It is axiomatic that if someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored. This explains today’s revival of protectionism, which is a plan to make America great again by making it 1953 again. This was when manufacturing’s postwar share of the labor force peaked at about 30 percent. The …

  If you applied for a mortgage in the past few years, you probably noticed that the record-low rates during much of that period were only available to a lucky few. Lending standards tightened a lot after the subprime fiasco. The torturous process — supplying the lender with triplicate tax returns, W-2s, character references and so on — was a …

  Risk is back on, so who needs chocolate? Nestle SA needs to roll with the times, and investors have a lot of optimism that its brand-new Chief Executive Officer, Ulf Mark Schneider, can produce a quick change of gear. He’s certainly got the right background, but the tactics Nestle needs aren’t in his DNA. Investors should tread cautiously. The …

  A high-ranking defector of North Korean has said that president Kim Jong-Un is planning a ‘prime time’ nuclear weapons push in 2017. The development comes as Pyongyang wants to take advantage of leadership transitions in South Korea and the United States. As per the revelation made by Thae Yong-Ho, who fled his post as North Korea’s deputy ambassador to …

  While the world looks to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to see where he’ll take Japan next year, a lesser-known name is a better guide to the country’s long-term future. Tai Jeng-wu, 65, took over as president of Sharp Corp. in August after Foxconn Technology Group, and its founder Terry Gou, won a four-year battle for control of the struggling …

  Even if it doesn’t get to host the IPO of Saudi oil giant Aramco, potentially the biggest float of all time, Hong Kong should still be able to maintain its billing as the world’s No. 1 venue for share sales next year. But with limited tech deals on the horizon, and most in the listing queue rather staid Chinese …

  Are you someone who has faith in the power of free markets? Then you should naturally accept the evidence that human activity is bringing about climate change. Free and competitive markets work efficiently in large part because they are phenomenal information aggregators, gathering and sorting facts about consumer preferences and business production costs, and guiding market participants to engage …

  What the former assistant secretary of the Navy said is descriptive of the entire military. Each service’s culture, and interservice rivalries, and bureaucratic viscosity are resistant to reform. Which is why the next secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, has the most difficult management challenge in American government. He comes from a service whose core mission, …