Opinion

Emerging markets are missing out on the trade of the decade. Green shoots are everywhere. China’s factory activity is finally stabilising, and the Federal Reserve may even cut interest rates this year. Both should be great news for stocks around the world. But nervous investors are busy selling instead, redeeming $2.6 billion of their holdings in emerging-markets ETFs over the ...

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was a courteous guest during a joint session of Congress, playing down current frictions within the alliance and praising President Donald Trump’s effort to get Europe to pay more for its own defense. This was more than just astute diplomacy: It was recognition that, despite the impression given by Trump’s many disparaging remarks about Nato, ...

Since 2004, China has been the world’s largest generator of waste, including plastics. And, since 2010 at least, China has been the largest source of waste plastic flowing into the world’s oceans. To its credit, the Chinese government has tried to shrink the problem. In recent years, it’s forced retailers to charge for single-use plastic bags that aren’t biodegradable (with ...

The jobs report brought a little good news for investors worried that a key part of the decade-long bull market is about to run out. Profit margins, which have reached record levels, are predicted to drop in the first quarter for companies in the S&P 500. While the drop is not expected to be sharp, there has been a growing ...

It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is killing the planet. Even renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year. The basic idea is that the profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless abandon. Though many economists and some climate activists ...

If you think you understand what’s going on with the global economy, you’re probably not paying attention. On the one hand, the stock market is powering ahead. Since its recent low on December 24, it was up 22.4 percent, according to the Wilshire 5000 total market index, which measures the value of all publicly traded US stocks. That’s a paper ...

Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis has been largely self-inflicted, but now it’s passing some of consequences onto its suppliers. A crash of an Ethiopian Airlines-manned Max in March — just five months after a Lion Air jet of the same type went down — has put the planemaker at the center of a political, legal and increasingly financial firestorm where ...

Facebook Inc. has mastered an array of corporate aptitudes — including its use of euphemism and obfuscation. So when its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, writes an op-ed asking governments to impose some new regulation on his company, a little skepticism is in order. Make that a lot of skepticism. Zuckerberg’s proposals, published in Washington Post, cover four topics: “harmful content,” elections, ...

UK Prime Minister Theresa May stopped trying to get her fellow Tories to back her plan for quitting the European Union (EU), and asked the opposition Labour Party to come to her aid. Could this be that most elusive of Brexit developments: progress? Not exactly. For many reasons — politics, self-interest, the fundamentally incoherent task at hand — May and ...

If you are looking for the thriller movie that has captured the attention of global markets, this is certainly the trade negotiation between the US and China. It stars an unpredictable leader (President Donald Trump), an impenetrable rival (Chinese President Xi Jinping) and an issue which is typically secretive and hard to understand (trade talks). Equity and currency markets have ...