Opinion

To many, the handling of the Brexit saga by the British government has appeared chaotic and inconsistent, leading some to predict the demise of Prime Minister Theresa May’s leadership and the risk of the UK stumbling into a disorderly Brexit. That is certainly a possibility. Yet game theory suggests that, with external constraints starting to bind a lot more, the ...

Exports have gone from a plus for Asia to a real drag. Almost daily, trade data from somewhere show a deterioration. Monday was Japan’s turn. Shipments dropped 1.2 percent in February from a year earlier, the third consecutive slide and twice the dip envisaged by economists. Many people view Japan’s challenges as unique and the country as in a long-term ...

My colleague Conor Sen made a bold prediction: Government will be the driver of the US economy in coming decades. The era of Silicon Valley will end, supplanted by the imperatives of fighting climate change and competing with China. This would be a momentous change. The biggest tech companies — Amazon.com, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google (Alphabet Inc.) and (a ...

The good news about President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget is that it vividly illustrates the basic causes of large, chronic deficits — a mismatch between the government’s commitments and the taxes needed to pay for them. The bad news is that the budget does virtually nothing to close the gap. “We must protect future generations from Washington’s habitual deficit spending,” ...

Duterte just did a Modi. He may be as lucky, too. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte bucked procedural niceties when selecting the man who will control the supply of money in his country. He bypassed three deputy governors of the central bank and installed a former budget minister and fan of stimulus to run Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The new governor, ...

The swell of talk about China implementing a property tax has resurfaced – again. But unlike past years, there’s growing certainty that it’s actually coming. Just not anytime soon. Late last week, shares of Chinese real-estate developers tanked after Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People’s Congress standing committee, said delegates will “focus energy” on drafting a property-tax law, among ...

Thailand’s long-delayed elections to be held on March 24 have stirred concern among some analysts that we will see a fresh round of protests and social unrest. Investors should look past any temporary disruption. Whatever the result, Thai leaders will move forward with a landmark project that will support growth in what has been one of the most economically stable ...

US politicians, who, like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, want to break up the big technology companies are treading onto a path that has long drawn their European colleagues. Europe has better opportunities and more compelling reasons to dismember Amazon, Facebook and Google. Yet it hasn’t done so, despite years of discussion. There are at least three reasons the EU is ...

The second annual report on the Women in Finance Charter, an initiative sponsored by UK Treasury to redress gender imbalance in the management ranks of financial firms, just landed. The good news is that there has been an improvement in the past year. The bad news is there’s still a long, long way to go before the industry meets even ...

In 2015, the United Nations set 17 sustainable development goals, laudable aims to help humanity to pursue a better future that included reducing inequality, eliminating extreme poverty and addressing climate change. The UN hoped to achieve all of them by 2030. In some areas, we’ve made impressive progress: Now only 1 in 25 children globally dies by the age of ...