Opinion

As Japan’s emperor Akihito prepares to abdicate, what’s known as the Heisei period — January 8, 1989, through April 30, 2019 — draws to a close. Those 30 years will forever be associated with the spectacular asset bubble that burst right at the beginning, and the economic lost decade that followed. Heisei was also when Japan’s population peaked and started ...

Every year, BloombergNEF’s advanced transport team builds a bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle (EV) and compares it to cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of same size. The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market. All things being equal, upfront price ...

Like the cotton gin and the modern assembly line, 3D printing is the kind of breakthrough advancement that holds the promise to revolutionise manufacturing. The technology lets companies input designs into a printer the size of a small garden shed and have it spit out fully formed, usable products or parts – often at a savings of time, manpower and ...

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran assumes that economic sanctions are weakening the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — and that more sanctions will make the IRGC weaker still. The problem is that US and European intelligence analysts don’t think this forecast is accurate. “Re-imposition of sanctions in 2018 has played into the hands of the IRGC,” warns ...

The health of the US economy largely comes down to consumers’ attitude and spending. That’s why some investors were anxious about the contentious government shutdown that lasted into early 2019; any lingering concerns could dampen the outlook for future growth. Judging by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s first-quarter earnings, that saga has barely been a blip. And that might just mean ...

China’s economy has come up for air, just a little. A bit of pep in recent Chinese numbers is encouraging. At least as important as the short-term bounce, though, is the long-term trajectory. The Middle Kingdom may lose its exceptionalism and start looking more like the US and Europe in ways that seemed barely conceivable during the 1990s and the ...

Financial regulators have done a lot to reform the derivatives markets that helped turn the financial crisis of 2008 into a global disaster. But their work is unfinished — and there’s even a danger that, in one way, they might have made things worse. Derivatives are bets on the performance of something else, such as stocks, interest rates or creditworthiness. ...

There’s one clear favourite in the world’s biggest election, which runs for six weeks: incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Buoyed by his personal popularity, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party isn’t even pretending to offer dramatic new programs if it returns to power. Its election manifesto, released earlier this week, was a relatively uninspiring document — a few populist promises to ...

On April 8, the Trump administration decided that now is the moment to ratchet up a longstanding trade dispute between Boeing Co. and Airbus SE. The US is threatening to impose $11 billion of punitive tariffs on a range of European products from aircraft to cheese. The dispute is unrelated to the crash of two Boeing 737 Max aircraft – ...

There is a strange sound of relief coming out of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF has slashed its global growth forecasts to the lowest level since the financial crisis, but it also believes policy makers may have stepped in just in time to avoid a turn for the worse. Central bankers deserve credit for pausing on their long ...