Opinion

Evidently, President Donald Trump is still toying with the idea of imposing steep tariffs on cars and automotive parts. In a White House brimming with bad economic ideas, this would be the worst one yet. Last month, the Commerce Department completed a confidential report on the national-security implications of auto imports. If the probe uncovered a threat of some kind, ...

The 2008 financial crisis and the deep recession that followed taught the world to be more skeptical of macroeconomic theories. In the years leading up to that crisis, many leading macroeconomists displayed a startling amount of complacency, bordering on hubris. The defining quote came in a 2003 essay, when Nobel-winning macroeconomist Robert Lucas made a startling declaration: Macroeconomics in [its] ...

India’s corporate funding market is what Winston Churchill might have described as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The riddle, according to India Ratings and Research Pvt., a unit of Fitch Ratings Inc., is that borrowers’ credit metrics aren’t likely to worsen from here. And yet in the financial year starting April 1, their borrowing costs may ...

Last April, when 34 technology companies announced their membership of a Cybersecurity Tech Accord, it was portrayed as proof that the private sector was, at long last, taking responsibility for protecting civilians online — something governments had conspicuously failed to do. Since then, the ranks of signatories to the self-imposed cybersecurity standards has more than doubled. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., ...

Fast-forward past next week’s critical Brexit votes in the UK parliament. If Britain ends up leaving the European Union (EU) without a deal, it will have to set its own independent trade policy for the first time in a generation. How would it mitigate the trade frictions it will face outside the bloc? Brexit supporters have a beguiling answer: eliminate ...

Remember when Japan was going to become the world’s biggest economy? Don’t laugh. Herman Kahn, the Rand Corp. futurist who partly inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove, predicted as far back as 1970 that Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) would overtake the US around the year 2000. Decades later, his prediction still seemed on track. Thanks in part to strength ...

Do you remember the National Security Agency (NSA’s) phone-records program? It was perhaps the most contentious of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and became the subject of a vicious multiyear imbroglio in Congress. Now the operation has been halted entirely — with barely a whimper. Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorised the government to collect a broad range of business records ...

Yet again, a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan appears to have been narrowly averted. As India looks ahead to its approaching election, the world’s biggest democracy should take care to draw the right lessons from the crisis. The great temptation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be to exploit and even inflame the country’s mood of militant ...

When a massive helium-filled airship designed by Flying Whales, a French manufacturer, takes to the air for the first time in 2021, it won’t be against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Instead, it’ll probably fly over Jingmen, a dusty farm and industrial town in central China where Flying Whales and state-owned China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co., Ltd. (CAIGA) ...

On March 7, Huawei Technologies Co. held a press conference to announce it’s suing the US government, arguing that a law passed last year barring the Chinese company’s equipment from certain networks is unconstitutional. A week earlier, its CFO Meng Wanzhou sued Canadian authorities alleging wrongful detention. Meanwhile, the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment maker has sought to recruit foreign journalists for ...