Opinion

The discovery that hackers could snoop on WhatsApp should alert users of supposedly secure messaging apps to an uncomfortable truth: “End-to-end encryption” sounds nice — but if anyone can get into your phone’s operating system, they will be able to read your messages without having to decrypt them. According to a report in the Financial Times, the spyware that exploited ...

Boeing Co.’s 737 Max woes make it a prime target for China’s trade-war retaliations. China, responding to increased tariffs imposed by the US, said that it will boost levies on nearly 2,500 American products to 25%, while several thousand other items will be subject to taxes ranging from 5% to 20%. Soon after, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of China’s Global ...

Briefly suspending their warnings about the rising tide of socialism, a large majority of Senate Republicans recently joined with almost all their Democratic colleagues in affirming the essence of socialism, which is government allocation of capital. The Senate’s revival of the Export-Import Bank is a redundant reminder that the rhetorical discord between the parties exaggerates their actual differences. The Ex-Im ...

Like a practitioner of the Japanese art of Kabuki, Emmanuel Macron’s administration is going through some elaborate dance steps to try to shape the future of the Renault-Nissan carmaking alliance. The French president wants to protect the jobs of his citizens, as well as taxpayer money and France’s credibility as an industrial investor. It’s been an incredibly clumsy performance. France ...

Persistent macroeconomic struggles and changing winds of domestic regulation have thrown plenty of curveballs at China’s top two technology companies, Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Yet both of them managed to offer promising signs for investors willing to take the time to dig into the numbers. The common thread for both was the performance of relatively new ...

President Trump’s trade fight with China has been commanding headlines and the attention of financial markets — but don’t forget that another trade dispute is simmering alongside. The US has threatened to impose new tariffs on cars imported from the European Union (EU), and the EU has prepared a list of imports from the US that will face higher tariffs ...

One of the most striking facts of today’s world is that young people do not seem to worry very much about nuclear war. Climate change is by far the larger concern, while nuclear war is seen as a threat of the past. As Chapin Boyer, who is in his late 20s, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a ...

Prospects that the trade war could rip apart the global auto industry are scary, perhaps even for President Donald Trump. Good thing it could just turn out to be bluster. Toning down his rhetoric, Trump is expected to give the European Union (EU) and Japan 180 days to agree to a deal that restricts the US’s imports of autos and ...

Think about extravagant campaign promises, and the words “policy review” don’t exactly leap to mind. And yet, in the steady-as-she-goes world of central bankers, Olli Rehn’s call for a comprehensive rethink of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) objectives has galvanised the race to succeed Mario Draghi. The ECB president steps down at the end of October and Rehn, governor of ...

A man who worked in a boxer’s corner in a 1962 match against Cassius Clay, as he still was known, explained why the referee stopped the fight in the fourth round: “Things just went sour gradually all at once.” It can be like that when government dabbles in protectionism. US industrial capacity has never been larger — it is 66% ...