Opinion

With two-thirds of the US experiencing a heat wave, it seems like a good time to talk about air conditioning. According to the annual Characteristics of New Housing data released by the Census Bureau early this month, 94 percent of the new housing units completed in the US in 2018 came with it built in, up from 65 percent in ...

Boeing Co.’s willingness to put a price tag on its 737 Max crisis and set a firmer timeline for the plane’s return is a sign it sees those troubles as closer to being resolved. The risk is that the company is still the most optimistic one in the room. Boeing announced it would take a $4.9 billion after-tax charge in ...

As part of a settlement with Germany’s antitrust authorities, Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to change a number of its business practices. The move should serve as a model to other US tech companies that prefer to pay fines to the European Union and challenge its antitrust rulings in the courts rather than alter their behaviour to comply with local rules. ...

With almost $13 trillion of bonds in the global debt market yielding less than zero, fund managers are increasingly chasing returns in less liquid assets. The result could be a reduction in the transparency about what portfolios are really worth. Regulators are right to be paying heightened attention to any misadventures in illiquidity. The decline in interest income available in ...

President Donald Trump reinserted himself into the Iran nuclear negotiations this week, with decidedly mixed results. Trump’s reiteration that he isn’t looking for regime change was welcome. As efforts to persuade Iran to scale back uranium enrichment intensify, it’s important for the regime to know that it faces no existential threat. The US hopes only to crimp its capacity to ...

Fifty years ago, India took a wrong turn leftward from which it is yet to recover: On July 19, 1969, the government took over the banking system, nationalising 14 banks which together controlled 85 percent of bank deposits. Today, even after a quarter century of liberalisation, state-controlled banks still control 70 percent of the sector’s assets. As a consequence, credit ...

The optimistic scenario about Netflix Inc. goes like this: The company is wise to spend like mad to create a new generation of entertainment service that capitalises on the inexorable shift of people away from old ways of wasting time like television towards new modes of wasting time like staring at smartphones. Eventually, the theory goes, Netflix will stop bleeding ...

Money talks, but the big question for PG&E Corp next week is how closely the bankruptcy judge is listening. The battle for the future of the wildfire-prone California utility intensified this week with a fusillade of court filings. To recap, PG&E has an exclusive period until late September to file a proposal to get out of chapter 11. Late last ...

Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O’Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This ...

At last, India’s in-court bankruptcies will show some urgency and common sense. The government said it would amend the 2016 insolvency law, a signature reform of Prime Minister NarendraModi’s first term. Investors will cheer. The legislation was getting mired in frustrating legal delays and bizarre judgments, threatening to scare off global investors from a $200-billion-plus bad-debt cleanup. The last straw ...