Opinion

Japan’s leaders seem happy to rest the country’s fate on the shoulders of its women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to get more of them out of the home to compensate for a shrinking workforce. His deputy Taro Aso, on the other hand, had to apologize recently after blaming them for not having enough kids. I can hear women secretly ...

US and Indian officials met in New Delhi last week for what promises to be a tetchy summit. The trade relationship between their countries has never been easy. The fact that India has a $22-billion trade surplus with the US — despite running a deficit with many of its other major trading partners — is particularly annoying to the Trump ...

Stop seeing Japan as a wasteland. The country’s economy, the world’s third largest, still matters. Japan isn’t stuck in a hopeless demographic-driven hole without escape. Rather, the three decades since the Bubble burst have had their ups and downs. Look at the fourth-quarter gross domestic product numbers. They aren’t brilliant; they aren’t terrible. What makes them interesting is their ordinariness: ...

In Apple Inc.’s effort to become more than the iPhone company, it has become savvier about pitching people apps, started a digital music subscription, and created an app for reading news. Apple is still the iPhone company despite those tactics. But consumers don’t have to wait long to see the next steps in Apple’s attempted transformation. Among the company’s coming ...

The showy first summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last June was draped in flags and bunting, but the decoration covered what turned out to be a mostly empty box that lacked a shared agreement on denuclearisation. Given this disappointing record, what’s realistically possible when the two leaders meet again in two weeks in Vietnam? ...

Italy’s populist government has its eye on the country’s financial regulators. Rome has suffered a long series of banking scandals, so it’s only fair to ask for more accountability. But the way the ruling League and Five Star Movement are proceeding should worry anybody who cares about the independence of these institutions. The coalition has nominated Paolo Savona, European Affairs ...

Wade past the shadows of the Carlos Ghosn debacle and a picture emerges of a car business that was already in deep trouble. Nissan Motor Co.’s operating profit dropped around 14 percent in the first nine months, margins shrank, and net income tanked 45 percent from a year earlier, the Japanese carmaker said. The company also booked a 9.2 billion-yen ...

President Trump has nominated David Malpass, a senior Treasury official and former Wall Street economist, to succeed Jim Yong Kim as next leader of the World Bank. Rather than rubber-stamp the US nomination, as the bank’s other member governments are generally inclined to do, they should ask whether Malpass is the best available candidate — and, even more important, start ...

For many years, respected macroeconomists scolded countries that failed to reduce their debt levels. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose job it is to lend money to poor countries in crisis, long demanded fiscal austerity in exchange for aid. In Japan, economists darkly warned of a solvency crisis as that country’s debt climbed. In the US, too, many economists cautioned ...

Day traders may be rejoicing at SoftBank Group Corp.’s biggest ever buyback, but for loyal believers in Masayoshi Son’s magic wand, it’s another worrisome development. SoftBank unveiled the repurchase program last week, promising to spend as much as $5.5 billion on its own stock over the coming year. That would be enough to buy 71 million shares, or 6.5 percent ...