Opinion

It’s getting harder and harder to write these budget columns, because it must be obvious to almost everyone by now that hardly anyone in Washington (or perh-aps any place) cares ab-out the budget deficits. The assumption is that we can raise spending and cut taxes forever — or until some crisis occurs that forces us to do involuntarily what we ...

If you are searching for the EU’s next bad idea, look no further than the “European Future Fund.” The 100 billion euro ($110 billion) pot, first reported in Politico, would be a way to boost strategic sectors which are seen as lagging behind China and the US. It’s not a formal policy plan, and the details are still scanty. But ...

The growing consensus is that even with all the trade tensions wreaking havoc in markets and global supply chains, as long as consumers stay resilient, the US will probably avoid recession. But a big enough decline in business investment —prompted by trade tensions and global manufacturing weakness — could be enough to create layoffs and dent consumption. So that’s the ...

Donald Trump is an unpopular president. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, only 43.3 percent of Americans approve of his performance. FiveThirtyEight, which weights polls by quality, sample size and partisan lean, puts the average at 41.6 percent. But as the president meets with leaders of the other G7 countries in the French resort city of Biarritz, he ...

The fires currently consuming Brazil’s Amazon rainforest seem a world away from the tense diplomacy in the US trade war with China. In truth, they’re more closely connected than you might suspect. One of Beijing’s main acts of retaliation in the fight has been to freeze purchases of the 30 million metric tons to 40 million tons of American soybeans ...

Who knew the work of disciplined inventory and expense management could get Wall Street this excited? Or, at least that’s what I think is driving a surge in shares of Nordstrom Inc., which reported second-quarter earnings. The retailer beat analysts’ earnings per share estimates, an outcome it chalked up to deft expense control. But, to my mind, practically everything else ...

When he failed to ignite a continental uprising against South America’s 19th-century colonial masters, Simon Bolivar was crestfallen. “He who serves the revolution plows the seas,” he despaired. Happily, Bolivar got it backward. From the Yucatan Peninsula to the Strait of Magellan, aquaculture is revolutionising food production. Plowing the oceans and inland waters, Latin America and the Caribbean expanded more ...

In a trade war, as in a real one, people are wounded by friendly fire from their side. Consider some casualties in Donald Trump’s “easy to win” — his promise — trade war. Begin with the company whose green machines bear the name of the blacksmith who, in the 1830s in Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a self-scouring plow that could ...

Investors have been looking for reasons to forgive Xiaomi Corp. for its post-IPO slump. They don’t appear to have found them yet. Shares of the Chinese smartphone maker reversed a 2.1 percent gain to plunge as much as 5.5 percent in Hong Kong after the company posted second-quarter earnings. They’ve dropped 47 percent since the July 2018 listing. The stock ...

In France, they call it taking mustard after dinner. In Germany, they talk about a child having already fallen in the well. In England, they speak of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. They all are good ways of describing how regulators have tended to deal with the world’s biggest tech firms. But when it comes to ...