Opinion

  Max Nisen Disappointing earnings. Substantially lower guidance for 2016. A CFO departure. A suspended dividend. A drug-pricing controversy. Oh, and a libel suit against a chicken farmer. All were features of Concordia International’s unusually calamitous earnings report on Friday. For a day, at least, the Ontario-based specialty pharma firm one-upped its better-known progenitor Valeant, which has had a mixed …

  Seated in his office here, wearing neither a necktie nor a frown, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is remarkably relaxed for someone at the epicenter of a crisis now in its second year and with no end in sight. But, then, stress is pointless when the situation is hopeless. Besides, if you can ignore the fact that self-government is failing …

  Brazil, it is often and not quite fairly said, is the country of the future and always will be. As the Olympics focuses global attention on the country, it’s worth exploring the various ways in which this maxim is — and may not be — true. The puzzle with Brazil is neither its successes nor its failures, but rather …

  Macy’s incoming CEO is starting off strong. He’ll need to get stronger. The department store said it would close 100 stores, or 14 percent of the 728 stores it currently operates. (Not included in the closings are the 100 or so Bloomingdales and Blue Mercury stores it also owns.) This announcement marks a sizable acceleration in store closings — …

  As the world reels under economic unpredictability and the market volatility grows, wisdom lies in tapping the benefits of Islamic economy. The Islamic bonds (sukuks) issued by UAE banks are being ranked as one of the world’s best-performing instruments. We will see rapid expansion of Islamic finance as more and more customers are added to the already huge and …

  There’s a very deep, important concept in economics that gets way too little attention from the public (and possibly from economists themselves). This is the idea of asymmetric information. The concept has been around for decades, and research about it has won Nobel prizes, but neither the profession nor the public has ever put it at the center of …

  Leonid Bershidsky Another Tesla has crashed because the driver thought its self-driving technology could actually drive the car. As we read all the stories about magical technology and then use the hyped-up products, we ought to keep in mind that the “magic” hits the market long before they live up to their promise, which in some cases they will …

  It’s a measure of international investors’ desperation that they are long the Russian ruble and other Russian assets. Even though fears of a major Russian onslaught in Ukraine are likely to prove unfounded, there’s nothing about the Russian economy that can support an asset boom, and it’s only a matter of time before the central bank is compelled to …

  Maybe the college student debt burden isn’t so crushing after all. That’s the surprising gist of a new study by economists at the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). It’s surprising because burgeoning student debt has become a new economic worry and a political “cause celebre.” It adds to the hurt of millennials, who already face a tough job …

  Facebook collects less than the 5 percent of the $500 billion spent on advertising each year. For Facebook to achieve the deepest, darkest dreams of Mark Zuckerberg, the company must become the first one that dominates both the kind of precision ads that built Google and the emotional ads that made TV the world’s dominant marketing force. Facebook has …