Opinion

US President Donald Trump has made closing America’s trade deficit with China a top priority. The problem is, it’s growing instead. For Trump, that’s probably more proof that his tariff-heavy, get-tough approach to China is the correct strategy. For economists, it’s not such a big deal. The US economy is roaring, and roaring economies tend to import more. There’s another ...

Roper Technologies Inc.’s stock slide now looks like unfair punishment. The $30 billion company, which makes software for construction companies and legal firms as well as meter-reading tools, had slumped 11 percent in the month leading up to the release of its third-quarter results on October 26. That matched the decline in the S&P 500 Industrials index, which has been ...

Amundi SA, already Europe’s biggest fund manager, is on course to meet its self-imposed target of swelling assets under management by a net 50 billion euros ($57 billion) per year. Its cost-to-income ratio is best-in-class. And yet its shares dropped 6 percent on October 26 to their lowest level since March 2017. While asset growth decelerated in the third quarter ...

Mario Draghi has a fine line to walk at last week’s press conference after the meeting of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) governing council. Bond investors will be watching closely to see how the ECB president responds to questions about Italy, and if there’s anything to be gleaned about whether future policy might be good or bad for the country’s ...

At many banks, November 5 will be a scary day. That’s when broad US sanctions are set to be re-imposed on Iran, thereby placing new pressure on its struggling economy and increasing the regime’s desperation for hard currency. A crucial side effect of this effort has gotten too little attention: Iran will likely attempt to skirt these sanctions through cyber-enabled ...

Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG and its British rival Barclays Plc kicked off the earnings season for Europe’s investment banks. The results weren’t great. Deutsche’s third-quarter trading revenues were dismal and its net income sank by two-thirds. Barclays’ investment bank fared better but still posted its lowest quarterly revenue in two years. Of the two, it’s Deutsche whose problems run deepest. ...

Do you know the story of Patty McCord, Netflix’s original human relations chief? It’s legendary, and worth recounting in the wake of Wall Street Journal story on the company’s culture. McCord was one of Netflix Inc.’s earliest employees. She was chief executive Reed Hastings’s neighbour in Santa Cruz, California, and the two of them often carpooled to work. In 2004, ...

Wherever he is, President Donald Trump exults in the US economic boom, calling it, falsely, the strongest in history. (He’s just recently stopped making the same inaccurate claim for the US stock market.) He even bragged about having a “magic wand” he could wave to conjure jobs and growth. Never mind that almost 13 million of the 17 million jobs ...

So daunting is the challenge of overhauling the global energy system to prevent further catastrophic climate change, that just thinking about it feels paralysing. It’s been done before though, at least on a national level. During the 1970s and 1980s France built scores of nuclear power plants that now provide almost three-quarters of the country’s electricity. At the time, French ...

We knew the global auto industry was struggling, but is it this bad? Hyundai Motor Co. announced an almost 67 percent drop in net income, saying one-time recall costs to address quality issues were chiefly to blame. There’s a deeper problem, though. Nobody was prepared for the result, and investors fled, pushing the stock down as much as 10.7 percent. ...