Opinion

In cyberspace, conflict is the norm when it comes to nation-states. Russia’s malware shows up on US power grids, and its online trolls try to influence elections. China, meanwhile, steals the personal data and intellectual property of leading American corporations. The US, for its part, has its hackers on a war footing. So it may seem the prospects for dialogue ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally decided that the stock market’s tantrum over the past month was too noisy to ignore. Traders bemoaned the fact that Powell considered the central bank’s balance-sheet runoff to be on “automatic pilot.” So he softened his tone on January 4 during a panel at an American Economic Association meeting in Atlanta, saying policy makers ...

Some likened it to a snowman. Others to a peanut. Still others to an embryonic dinosaur. Ultima Thule, a mottled and malformed space rock at the farthest edge of the solar system, got its first close-up photos this week thanks to Nasa’s New Horizons mission. They offered a glimpse of the most distant object ever visited by man-made machinery — ...

The damage caused by President Trump’s trade fight with China has spread farther and faster than many expected. Factories in China and the US have seen orders slump. American farmers are hurting. A collapse in Chinese demand for iPhones knocked nearly $75 billion off Apple Inc.’s market cap in a single day. Slower growth just prompted China’s central bank to ...

For the head of the World Bank Group to quit unexpectedly would have been big news under any circumstances. But, the reason outgoing president Jim Yong Kim gave for his resignation on Monday is even more revealing. Kim said he was leaving the world’s most influential development and infrastructure-building agency to join a private-sector infrastructure investment fund because he believed ...

Build it and they will come. Or will they? A flurry of construction may be about to take off in China, and investors have pinned their hopes on it. Stocks of Japanese machinery makers Komatsu Ltd. and Hitachi Construction Machinery Co. perked up on Monday. Over the past week, Chinese engineering and construction companies’ shares have surfaced from multi-month lows. ...

Health-care costs are not as much in the news nowadays as they used to be. A big reason might be that cost growth has slowed in recent years. Between 1967 and 2007, per-capita health care costs rose at an average of 2.36 percent a year. Since then, it’s only been about 1.31 percent. That’s actually not such great news. Health-care ...

President Donald Trump in a meeting with congressional Democrats last week said he was prepared for the partial government shutdown to continue for months — or even years — if he doesn’t get the money he wants for a wall along the Mexican border. It’s not hard to see how that prediction comes true. Both sides have framed the issue ...

China’s foreign debt has been rising rapidly, and that’s becoming an increasingly big problem — for the country and, potentially, the world. Officially, China lists its outstanding external debt at $1.9 trillion. For a $13 trillion economy, that’s not a major amount. But focusing on the headline number significantly understates the underlying risks. Short-term debt accounted for 62 percent of ...

The sharp appreciation of the yen in the twilight zone between US and Asia trading days isn’t just an overreaction to poor results from Apple Inc. in thin trading (Japan doesn’t return from its New Year holiday until January 4.) It is a portent of the struggles ahead for the country’s central bank in 2019. It’s going to be harder ...