Opinion

Britain’s parliament hasn’t yet voted on Theresa May’s Brexit deal or on whether it still has confidence in her government. The first will happen on January 15 and if, as expected, she loses, the Labour Party is threatening to hold a vote on the latter soon after. But two votes that members of parliament have held so far this week ...

China is planning to give the world’s largest auto market a shot in the arm. Don’t be so sure it’ll work. As the nation prepared to post its first annual decline in car sales in at least two decades, a senior official said the government would announce measures to encourage consumers to buy cars and other goods. The statement finally ...

Despite President Donald Trump criticisms that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates too far, too fast, thereby penalizing the economy, the flatness of the bond market’s yield curve suggests policy rates are just about at a level that neither stimulates nor restrains growth. But in order for the Fed to engineer a soft landing from last year’s heady growth ...

President Donald Trump has said that he can declare a national emergency and order his border wall to be built. He’s wrong. The US Constitution doesn’t contain any national emergency provision that would allow the president to spend money for purposes not allocated by Congress. And it’s clearer than clear that Congress not only hasn’t authorized money for a wall ...

A slowing economy and relatively high prices have been highlighted as chief culprits behind the slump in demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhones in China. There’s a third factor that’s been overlooked: the end of easy money. Apple last week cut its quarterly revenue forecast for the first time in almost two decades, blaming weak sales in Asia’s largest economy. Cheaper ...

Samsung Electronics Co. missed analyst estimates for fourth-quarter operating profit by 22 percent, the most in two years. That shortfall may be as much a function of sell-side analysts’ financial modeling as Samsung’s inability to deliver stronger earnings. Buy-siders, for example, have been selling down the stock since the middle of the third quarter, an indication that they saw tough ...

It took Italy’s populists just eight minutes to renege on one of their flagship stances. The coalition government gave its go-ahead to a bank bailout, saying it is willing to recapitalise Banca Carige, a troubled mid-sized lender, if needed. The plan smacks of hypocrisy. For years, the Five Star Movement has accused its political opponents of using public money to ...

Where did Nissan Motor Co. end and the world of Carlos Ghosn begin? It’s unclear after his decades-long reign. “I have dedicated two decades of my life to reviving Nissan and building the Alliance,” Ghosn told a Tokyo court on Tuesday in his first appearance since his arrest, according to a prepared statement. He had worked “day and night, on ...

Prime Minister Theresa May likes to insist that her Brexit deal means Britain will “take back control” over its borders. But with just three months to go before the UK leaves the European Union, the very opposite is happening. Control is being outsourced, not taken back. The money and skills needed to create Britain’s post-Brexit infrastructure are making the country ...

Fourth-quarter earnings tend to be an afterthought for investors in the US industrial giants. By this point in time, they usually have a good sense of the year that was and have already heard from companies on the near-term outlook. Not this year. Investors don’t have the same assurances headed into this earnings season and will be parsing the numbers ...