Opinion

FedEx Corp. has managed to fall out of a basement window. Expectations heading into the parcel-delivery company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings were low. In the past six months, the company cut its 2019 outlook twice amid a weakening global trade backdrop; announced a series of puzzling executive departures; became a candidate for inclusion on China’s list of unreliable entities; and dropped ...

When the maker of the top-selling arthritis drug says it’s buying a leader in anti-wrinkle treatments, you’d be forgiven if your initial response to the news was that it seems like a match made in heaven. But take a closer look, and AbbVie Inc.’s $63 billion purchase of Botox maker Allergan Plc isn’t such a perfect fit. AbbVie is desperate ...

President Donald Trump’s decision to restart sales of US technology products to Huawei Technologies Co. may ease tensions with China, and even help end the trade war. Yet as far as deals go, this is set to be one of Trump’s worst. It doesn’t stop the technology cold war underway, and weakens the US stance that Huawei isn’t just a ...

The internet was supposed to render geography irrelevant. But the corporations that dominate the internet have turned out to be remarkably concentrated, geographically speaking. In internet publishing and web search portals, a somewhat ungainly but very important North American Industry Classification System category, 58 percent of all US jobs in December could be found in just five counties, and more ...

So much for deleveraging. China’s biggest shadow lenders are back. On the surface, it may look like regulators have managed to shrink the role of trust companies, after a wide-ranging, mo-nths-long crackdown on China’s financial underbelly. Assets und-er management at these lightly regulated non-bank financial firms – a hybrid of private equity, asset management and lending – posted their first ...

Rare is the week that doesn’t bring some new controversy over someone or something being banned from Twitter or Facebook for being too offensive. As regular readers know, I prefer more speech to less speech, but this column isn’t about what content rules private companies should enforce. Today I’m wearing my fair-process hat. These mighty controversies over kicking users off ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of routine, and one might have been tempted to ignore his 17th annual call-in show with voters as another pointless set piece. This year, however, the context made it more important than most of the previous ones: Putin, who’s trying to return to pedestrian domestic concerns after a long foray into great-power politics, ...

One might have thought that Brexit debate could not be made any more confusing. But the Conservative Party leadership race is doing just that. The obfuscation serves a political purpose. Early this year, Brexiters who are happy for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal latched on to an argument that Britain, once it leaves, can keep ...

At first blush, the optics of Huawei Technologies Co. staff working alongside China’s military aren’t great. Company employees teamed up with various organs of the Peoples’ Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors over the past decade, spanning artificial intelligence and radio communications, Bloomberg News reported, citing publicly available documents. Among the joint projects: extracting and classifying emotions in ...

To President Donald Trump, and any other Group of 20 chief thinking about waging a currency war: It’s basically impossible to win. That’s partly because they don’t really happen in practice. If they did, everybody would lose because everyone would play. The surest way to affect the relative value of an exchange rate is through nudging interest rates up or ...