Opinion

The good news is, Boeing Co. is starting to do the right things. The bad news is, it’s going to be expensive. The airplane maker said it would recommend pilots undergo flight-simulator training on its 737 Max before the embattled plane returns to service, reversing its previous stance that computer-based education would be sufficient. The Max has been grounded since ...

Australia isn’t what the world thought it was. A country that markets itself on the basis of its wide-open blue skies, azure waters and huggable wildlife is suddenly presenting a different face: Tourists in holiday towns, huddled on beaches to get away from the impending fire front; cities choked by orange smoke and falling ash; kangaroos and koalas incinerated as ...

For all the fears that central banks are out of ammunition, looser monetary policy over the past year provided a vital safety net that enabled stocks to surge and wiped out fears of recession. As 2020 unfolds, expect more easing. The year is barely a week old and already we have some indication about how things will unfold. In minutes, ...

India’s economy hasn’t been this bad in 42 years. Pulling it back from the abyss will require more honesty than imagination. The last week’s advance estimates for the financial year ending on March 31 peg the economy’s inflation-adjusted growth rate at 5%, a third year of slowdown. And even this figure could be optimistic. Consumer demand is in the doldrums ...

My main prediction for 2020, if it can be called a prediction, is trend exhaustion: For the first time in a long while, several important trends have come to an end. What do I mean by that? Trends ebb and flow, of course, but at any given moment many of them embody one of two distinct states: momentum, or reversion ...

The past decade experienced a revolution in how the Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy. While new tools such as quantitative easing have received the most attention, just as significant have been the changes made in how the Federal Open Market Committee sets and controls the level of short-term interest rates. Before the financial crisis, the Fed controlled short-term rates by ...

The Benetton name has become tarnished in Italy. The billionaire family has become synonymous with troubled infrastructure group Atlantia SpA, now facing serious financial repercussions over the tragic collapse of the Morandi road bridge in 2018. The episode starkly underscores how business is a complex social activity which depends on much more than legal contracts between its stakeholders. The investigation ...

Carlos Ghosn was nothing short of a celebrity in Japan. He carefully cultivated the image of a rebel outsider, but operated successfully enough within Japan Inc. to be adopted as something of a national hero after resuscitating Nissan Motor Co. He took on the system, yet scored its biggest victories when it was still intact. Ghosn ended up taking advantage ...

Technology changed every molecule of life in the 2010s. Airbnb, Uber and other young companies morphed the physical complexion of cities and how they work. The growing prevalence of e-commerce, fast internet connections and smartphones in everyone’s pockets shifted how we shop, behave and are entertained — with both good and bad ripple effects. Even the stodgiest industries were forced ...

Suppose that a nation, a company or an individual wants to give a lot of money to a university, a non-profit group or an individual researcher. Suppose that many people think that the potential donor is morally abhorrent, or has done morally abhorrent things. Is it wrong to take the money? A lot of real-world cases raise this difficult question. ...