Opinion

You’d expect the world’s second-largest economy to have a bigger presence on the world stage. But in mergers and acquisitions, China’s presence has been shrinking for years, and 2020 is unlikely to be any better. In 2016, the country was the world’s largest acquirer of overseas assets after the US. It tumbled to eighth place this year, trailing Japan and ...

Sharp Corp. buying all or parts of Japan Display Inc. could bring more bad news for Wisconsin’s hopes of hosting a world-class display factory. That’s because Osaka-based Sharp is actually owned by Foxconn Technology Group, the Taiwanese iPhone assembler that at one point said it would invest $10 billion to build a leading-edge 10.5-generation liquid crystal display plant in the ...

Some leaders in the US are intent on reviving the old dream of high-speed rail. Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing $607 billion for a new high-speed train network as part of his Green New Deal. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez included it in her own plan earlier this year. On Twitter, Sanders’s political allies sing the praises of high-speed rail systems such ...

Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t confronted since the 1988 presidential election. They are trying to persuade enough Americans to kick a Republican out of the White House even though the economy is doing well. They failed that year – and as their latest presidential debate showed, so far they haven’t figured out how to meet the challenge this ...

Amid the grim march of the retail apocalypse, the industry has derived some hope in recent years from the rise of scores of digital-centric startups. There is cause for optimism, but there’s also reason to be skeptical of the hype surrounding these brands — not just because their business models aren’t proving durable, but also because many of them are ...

The suspense is over. After a seemingly endless carousel of candidates mulled over in the media, the next Bank of England governor will be the longstanding favorite Andrew Bailey. Seen as the ultimate safe pair of hands and respected across government and the City of London, he was always the logical choice — if not necessarily the most exciting. His ...

Economists may be finally closing in on the reason for asset bubbles. How to pop them before they grow too large, however, is a much harder problem. The study of bubbles has steadily gathered urgency during the past four decades as crashes became more spectacular and more damaging. The stock crash of 1987 was a wake-up call for those who ...

In recent years, much of the commentary about climate change has gone from sternly serious to wildly despairing. A new report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the effects of climate change are accelerating and that the world has barely more than a decade to make deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and limit ...

A simple lesson we should have learned from the financial crisis is that complexity begets abuse, and undermines stability. Yet the key measure we use to determine banks’ health is so fiendishly difficult to understand that outsiders have no choice but to accept what we’re told by the lender. That’s the conclusion of a broad UK government review of the ...

Among the biggest surprises of the past decade was the initial public offering of the Palo Alto company that outperformed every automaker from Detroit to Toyota City to Wolfsburg and is now the undisputed champion of total return, sales growth and long-term shareholder value. That would be 10-year-old Tesla and its zero-emission, battery electric Model S, X and 3 vehicles. ...