Opinion

If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations group charged with monitoring global warming. Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), ...

Gold isn’t like anything else on the market. Ancient, fundamental, eternal – it’s different from all those here-today, gone-tomorrow assets such as Snap Inc. shares and cryptocurrencies. Right? Wrong. The last week’s surge in the spot gold price – a 2.5 percent jump to $1,224 an ounce, its sharpest leap in more than two years – looks like confirmation of ...

Mercury is a noxious byproduct of burning coal. It contaminates fish and, in turn, people, leading to brain damage in infants and small children, as well as serious cardiovascular and central nervous system problems in adults. Restrictions on US power plants have substantially reduced their emissions of mercury since 2015. Apparently, the Trump administration has a problem with that. Specifically, ...

There’s no economic crisis in China. There is a slowdown. That can be a good thing. Yes, China is the second-largest economy and deeply enmeshed in the planet’s commercial map. That’s all the more reason it needs to keep becoming a more normal economy, with a more mature pace of growth. That will increasingly be driven by consumers and technology, ...

Corporate tax cuts were basically the last hope for supply-side economics. This economic doctrine, which became popular in the 1980s, holds that taxes distort the economy a great deal, and that cutting taxes therefore produces big gains in growth. Those gains are assumed to eventually result in higher wages for workers, leading some to derisively label the idea as trickle-down ...

The market for initial public offerings (IPO) had been giving off warning signals long before this week’s rout in global stocks. The two are connected — and the human investors had a lead over the robot traders. London saw two big IPO disappointments which happened to be divisive stocks with strong bear cases. Online lender Funding Circle Holdings Plc, down ...

Indian retail investors won’t easily forgive their fund managers, nor will they quickly forget this wealth destruction. Out of 416 open-ended, onshore equity funds, 401 have lost money this year. Tech funds, the only ones to have performed decently, have been helped by Asia’s worst-performing currency of 2018. And that’s only because Indian software exporters earn revenues in a strong ...

China just dealt a blow to the global luxury goods industry. You can blame the trade war for that. The crackdown on the daigou trade – in which tourists, friends and relatives buy high-value products overseas and send them back into the country to avoid China’s hefty sales and import taxes – has sent shares in luxury houses tumbling. After ...

Spare a thought for Italian banks if you can. Barely recovered from their recent crisis, the country’s lenders find they have stumbled into a new one. Rome’s populist administration has sent yields on government bonds soaring by passing a budget that busts the EU’s fiscal rules. And since Italian banks still hold hefty amounts of those bonds, investors have taken ...

Wall Street’s powerhouses are beginning to lose some power. JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off third-quarter earnings for the big banks on Friday, and while the results were better than expected, they showed a lack of energy in key division: investment banking. Revenue from fixed-income trading was down 10 percent, which was worse than analysts were expecting. Fees from equity ...