Opinion

You have to make your own luck, allegedly, but it really helps when stuff just goes your way. And it really really helps if you can somehow combine favourable vagaries with a little fortune-engineering of your own. Such alchemy is practiced in the c-suites of an industry with a Vegas-like affinity for the lucky: oil. Intuitively, bosses get paid well ...

Is US  President Donald J Trump dismantling the regulatory state? Not close. To be sure, recent headlines give the impression that he is. On one day, the Department of Transportation proposes to scale back fuel-economy requirements for motor vehicles. On another, the Department of Education proposes to eliminate regulations on for-profit colleges, designed to protect against exploitation and abuse of students. ...

Italy’s new government has clearly learned that saying the right sort of thing works. Yields have raced in this week on a barrage of press reports that the populist government is going to respect European Union rules in the 2019 budget. Ten-year BTP yields have fallen nearly 40 basis points this week, driving the spread to German debt down to ...

Whenever there’s a bout of emerging-markets flu, Indonesia catches it. Jakarta may be crying foul, because it looked as though the nation was inoculated: Since May, Bank Indonesia has raised benchmark rates by 1.25 percentage points as insurance against the stronger dollar, almost as aggressive a move as during the 2013 taper tantrum. Meanwhile, President Joko Widodo’s government may increase ...

Apparently, President Donald Trump doesn’t like the news that he sees about himself on Google, Facebook and Twitter. So he’s accusing them of being rigged against him — and against conservatives in general. Absurd as Trump’s claim may be, the tech giants have it coming. Trump is probably wrong that the gatekeepers of the internet are suppressing conservative views and ...

The antitrust movement is making a comeback. Zephyr Teachout, candidate for New York state attorney general, is promising to fight monopolies. Activists such as Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute are beginning to draw attention to the problem of concentrated market power. Think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth are starting to zero in on the issue ...

Hedge funds haven’t been this bearish for years. In the last month, funds quickly sold down their positions in emerging markets to levels last seen in August 2015, when China scared the world with a surprise devaluation, and early 2016, when Beijing terminated a silly experiment with circuit breakers in a futile attempt to rescue the stock market. Emerging markets ...

Will robots run the factories of the world? There may be clues in Japan. Tokyo-listed Nidec Corp. makes motors of all sizes that show up in just about everything: your car, your washing machine, even hard-disk drives from back in the day. The company was founded in 1973 by Shigenobu Nagamori, an acquisitive and ambitious Japanese billionaire who counts Masayoshi ...

Donald Trump’s absence from Asia-Pacific summits will do little harm to America’s long-term standing in the region. It might even help. The president’s decision to skip two international meetings in November was predictably seen as evidence of American neglect of a vital region, underscoring the unilateralist instincts of Trump. The complaints are fair. But let’s not mistake pageantry for trends ...

There are fintechs, and then there are fintechs. Cheerleaders point to payments startups like Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc., whose stock has soared 242 percent in a year, as evidence of a Silicon-Valley-style revolution in the making. But there are sob stories, too: loan platforms LendingClub Corp. and On Deck Capital Inc. are still trading well below their IPO prices. Promises ...