Opinion

Twin moves by the White House and Commerce Department have made clear where the US stands on Chinese technology, specifically Huawei Technologies Co. The message to US companies seeking to buy products from the telecom-equipment vendor is unambiguous: Don’t even think about it. The message to Huawei, meanwhile, is: Don’t push us. In his executive order, President Donald Trump summarised ...

Global stocks rebounded on optimism that maybe cooler heads will prevail before the trade wars get out of hand. That optimism is likely to be short-lived. Investors should not only expect to be buffeted repeatedly by tit-for-tat measures by the US and China, but by global trade disputes on two other major fronts. Such pessimism on the part of investors ...

First China. Now India? In recent months, President Donald Trump has made clear that the trade war will reach beyond the People’s Republic. Not only has he threatened Japan and Europe with import duties on cars, he’s repeatedly blasted India as “the tariff king.” Trump has obsessed over the Asian giant’s high levies on Harley-Davidson motorcycles and complained about its ...

There’s a jarring disconnect at the heart of Australia’s 28-year economic miracle. The direction of the central bank’s latest forecasts has been clear: Estimates for the pace of growth were axed to 1.75 percent in the year to June 30, compared with 2.5 percent anticipated just three months earlier. Inflation, hovering below target since 2015, won’t climb back to the ...

Bloomberg NEF’s latest annual outlook for electric vehicles is here. As usual, there’s a lot packed into those 130-odd pages. Here are two nuggets to get you started. First, Bloomberg NEF forecasts sales of electric passenger vehicles – mostly all-electric but including plug-in hybrids – to overtake sales of those running solely on internal combustion engines in 2038. That sounds ...

President Trump has styled himself in foreign policy as the Great Disrupter. And for a time, this unpredictable approach served him reasonably well. Leaders from China, North Korea and Iran found themselves off balance, and they sometimes made what looked like concessions. Trump’s problem is that, after two years, foreign nations seem to have figured him out. Rather than crafting ...

Social networks such as YouTube and Facebook have the power to make content go “viral,” spreading it at an unprecedented and uncontrollable pace. That seems innocent enough when you’re looking at a cat video, but if it’s murder, for example, the lack of a way of stopping the virus becomes glaring. After the New Zealand mosque shootings were streamed live ...

It’s no secret that India’s banking regulator hates having its officials sit on the boards of state-run lenders. The practice exposes the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to all kinds of potential conflicts it would rather avoid. So when the RBI used its special powers to appoint a former deputy governor as a director of Yes Bank Ltd., a non-state ...

Start with the good news: Some 150,000 migrants sought to enter Europe illegally last year. That represents a 92% drop since 2015. The number of people seeking asylum in 2018 was 646,000, less than half of what it was three years ago. In numerical terms, Europe’s migration crisis is over. Politically, the issue remains as divisive as ever. Ahead of ...

Fossil-fuel advocates have a favorite rejoinder to those who predict a global shift to renewable energy: Coal has never been more popular. It’s a decent argument because it happens to be true. While coal-fired power has declined by nearly a quarter in Europe and almost 40 percent in North America over the past decade, the change has been overwhelmed by ...