Opinion

I’m cautious about Netflix Inc.’s financial health and the wisdom of its investors as the company finances its growth by spending on investors’ dimes. Netflix, though, has underappreciated advantages over the growing number of Netflix wannabes. That’s not to say Netflix will ‘win’ against the competition from Walt Disney Apple Inc., AT&T Inc.’s Time Warner and others. As people spend ...

The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’ mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities. They ...

An investigation by federal authorities into the possible theft of trade secrets by Huawei Technologies Co. could give even more weight to a US campaign against the Chinese company. Civil suits against Huawei, including a case where it was found liable by a jury in 2017 for the theft of T-Mobile US Inc. robotics technology, appear to be the springboard ...

That pain the global tech industry felt at the end of 2018 isn’t about to abate. The outlook from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. last week in Taipei paints a dire picture that will persist at least through the middle of this year. Those dark clouds I warned about in August haven’t gotten any lighter. At the time, I noted that ...

Fearing that low unemployment would spur serious inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate nine times since December 2015 and has started to shrink the size of its balance sheet assets in an effort to tighten credit. So imagine the surprise when the minutes of the Fed’s December monetary policy meeting stated that “many participants expressed the ...

When Elon Musk broke ground on Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory in Shanghai earlier this month, he wasn’t just thinking about how many Teslas he’ll sell in China. He was thinking about how many he might be able to share. Musk isn’t alone. Global automobile manufacturers are scrambling to develop services that will allow Chinese car owners to rent out their vehicles ...

BlackRock Inc. proved last year that it can beat the market. What the world’s largest asset manager still needs to prove is that it won’t get tripped up by its own success. Fourth-quarter earnings were down and missed expectations, BlackRock announced last week, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. BlackRock oversees about $6 trillion in assets, about half of which are ...

The ‘gig economy’ has become the cause celebre for people who think labor needs help from government in its struggle with capital. Politicians from the radical left and anti-establishment parties say the rise of casual work is a sign that work relationships are sliding back in time and that the state must step in to address this decline in standards. ...

General Electric (GE) and Sears have fallen on hard times, and that tells us a lot about US capitalism. Both were once great enterprises — symbols of American ingenuity and imagination. The temptation will be to blame their troubles on mismanagement. The real lesson is starker. It is that no business, no matter how historically innovative or powerful, is guaranteed ...

Consumerism in post-1978 China has ridden five waves: from finding a solution to food shortages; to owning the “new big three” (refrigerator, colour TV and washing machine); spending more on information; buying automobiles; and finally, real estate. All the swells are now spent, according to Renmin University economist Xiang Songzuo. Using stimulus to reverse the first annual decline in car ...