Opinion

  The junk-bond bears have been terribly wrong this year. But they’re sticking with their pessimistic calls. Distressed-debt investor Anchorage Capital, for example, which lost 1.48 percent in the first six months of the year, has urged clients to start preparing for a downturn, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The founders of rival King Street expressed a similar sentiment in a …

  Data shows that Japan’s economy stalled in the April-June quarter. It has missed the market forecasts and reignited worries about the government’s bid to prop up economy. Tokyo stocks fell after hitting their highest levels for over two months in the previous session. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently announced a massive 28 trillion yen ($276 billion) package aimed …

  How much leeway should Marines have to express their religious beliefs? According to Congress, religious liberty laws apply with full force to the military. But last week the highest court in the armed forces put some limits on claims by active-duty personnel. Those limits cut against recent trends in Supreme Court jurisprudence — but they make a lot of …

  Albert R. Hunt The lunch group in Monessen, Pennsylvania, is evenly divided between Trump supporters and Trump opponents. But the dark mood across the whole room suggests why this working-class town might end up favouring him in November. Monessen, once a steelmaking hub, has steadily lost plants, jobs and population over the decades. Along Donner Avenue, there are more …

  A great mystery of our time — one that should frame the campaign debate — is why the economic recovery has been so sluggish. Consider this comparison. After the brutal recession of the early 1980s (peak unemployment: 10.8 percent), it took only 11 months for employment to regain its pre-recession level. By contrast, it required 51 months after the …

  These are the world’s five largest technology companies, ranked by revenue: How about that Hon Hai!?! The full name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., but you probably know it as Foxconn, the main name it does business under. It’s the Taiwan-based contract manufacturer with hundreds of thousands of employees in mainland China, several of whom probably put your …

  Rules are there to be broken — and that’s official. Spain and Portugal have just escaped punishment for breaking the European Union’s budget-deficit limits. In the EU, such lapses without consequences are not exactly uncommon. In the case of the budget rules, that’s a good thing, because the rules are widely acknowledged to be no good. But here’s a …

  International Monetary Fund had predicted that China’s economy would grow by 6.6% in 2016. And the economists polled by Reuters had anticipated a growth rate of 6.6 percent. But China’s economy narrowly beat estimates with a 6.7 percent expansion on-year in the three months through June, as a string of stimulus measures from the government and the central bank …

  A top Bavarian domestic intelligence official has made tabloid headlines by saying there are “hit squads” and “sleeper cells” among the refugees who have recently arrived in Germany — something right-wing populists have been maintaining all along. Yet the true “sleeper cells” have been here for decades, and that explains why, as Germany and other European countries step up …

  Nir Kaissar There’s a strange disconnect today between some investors’ trepidation about US stocks and the soothing signals coming from the equity market. As my Bloomberg colleague Barry Ritholtz recently noted, a whole bunch of high-profile money mavens — Stan Druckenmiller, George Soros and Bill Gross included — are kvetching about the dangers lurking in U.S. shares (among other …