Opinion

The collapse of a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders last weekend in Papua New Guinea isn’t the end of the world. In fact economic relations between the 21 nations won’t change much. Most need both China and the US — and that’s what they will continue to get. For the first time since leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) group ...

Many of us will have breathed a sigh of relief as, after a marathon eight-hour meeting on Monday, it looked like India’s government and its central bank had finally made peace with each other after weeks of very public sniping. Reports after the meeting stressed that the tone had been “conciliatory.” (The Reserve Bank of India’s own readout of the ...

Sometimes you just have to play to your strengths. While Xiaomi Inc. proclaims its status as an internet player, the Chinese company has been unable to shed its reputation for being basically a smartphone maker. Its inability to convince investors has been a major reason the stock has fallen 20 percent since Xiaomi’s July IPO. So it makes sense for ...

If you depose a king, you’d best have a plan for what to do in the aftermath. That’s the challenge confronting Nissan Motor Co. CEO Hiroto Saikawa after the remarkable palace coup in which Chairman Carlos Ghosn was dethroned after almost two decades bestriding the global auto industry. The man who’s widely seen as indispensable to the collective functioning of ...

The world’s oldest political party has developed an aversion to discretion. The Democratic Party is manacled to an over-caffeinated base that believes that deft government can deliver parity of status to everyone while micromanaging the economy’s health care sector, which is larger than all but three other foreign nations’ economies. Inconveniently, the party must appeal to voters who, living in ...

When the forecasts landed earlier this fall for the holiday shopping blitz, all signs pointed towards a merry Christmas for retailers. But last week, major chains such as Macy’s Inc., Walmart Inc., Nordstrom Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc. saw their shares whacked after publishing third-quarter earnings results. Was that a signal that something has gone off course? I don’t think so. ...

The appetite for low-cost passive funds is driving evolution at both ends of the scale in the asset management business. The biggest firms need to add more exotic products which can still command higher fees than their vanilla funds. And that means there’s an opportunity for smaller specialist managers to sell themselves to their larger brethren. Sushil Wadhwani is selling ...

If the British parliament throws out the deal that Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has negotiated with the European Union (EU), it will be most regretted in Brussels, because the deal in its existing form essentially insulates Europe from most of the Brexit fallout. There’s a reason Donald Tusk, the European Council president, hurried to call a meeting of EU ...

China’s vaunted economic managers aren’t infallible — and they’re currently making a familiar mistake. They are trying to accomplish too many objectives simultaneously, many of which conflict with each other. Instead of engineering a recovery, the resulting confused policy mix is only feeding a growing feeling of uncertainty among Chinese markets, businesses and households. That will continue to depress growth ...

The world’s policy makers need to disentangle their feelings about Donald Trump from their efforts to address the challenges facing the global economy and US-Asia relations. It’s a tall order, but there are signs that they might be making progress. Over the past year, I’ve been to a lot of conferences where everyone was focused on Trump and the disruptions ...