Opinion

Unlike their American peers’ unceasing love for gas guzzlers, Chinese consumers are getting over them. The country’s carmakers should recalibrate. Auto stocks have been the worst-performing sector in China as sales slide and foreign carmakers stake claims to a bigger share of the world’s largest market. Earnings last week didn’t give investors too much to bet on. Sales of Chinese ...

When they’re asked to make bets, social scientists have a surprising knack for predicting which of their colleagues’ papers are full of baloney. This is in contrast to the notoriously bad job social scientists have apparently been doing evaluating papers through traditional peer review. In a series of attempts to test the health of the field, a high proportion of ...

If President Donald Trump’s pronouncements are to be believed, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the US, Canada and Mexico will soon be replaced by a bilateral US-Mexico trade agreement, presumably with a US-Canada agreement to follow. The actual changes to US-Mexico trade rules don’t look very substantial. The new agreement essentially implements a partial minimum wage for ...

The difficulties for emerging markets have entered a new phase. What were once clearly country-specific crises, well contained within their borders, are bleeding across the world. To stem the slide in its currency Argentina raised its key rate to a whopping 60 percent last week, but the peso was still 30 percent weaker. Though Turkey is no closer to solving ...

Donald Trump is the most powerful person in the world, and he has a loud megaphone. One word or tweet from him can move markets, or galvanize rage against a person or institution. Yet Amazon.com Inc. stayed quiet when the US president said the company crushes small businesses, may be violating anti-monopoly laws, dodges taxes and takes advantage of the ...

The next round of US tariffs on Chinese imports — $200 billion worth — could come as soon as this week, after talks to avert them ended without resolution. China is set to retaliate promptly with duties on nearly everything it imports from the United States. Even as he signaled an initial deal with Mexico, President Donald Trump declared it ...

From debt vultures and cooked books to fiscal time bombs, Argentine President Mauricio Macri inherited quite the mess. In his three years of office, he’s handled most of these challenges remarkably well, drawing cheers from investors and his compatriots. Here was a decisive, business-friendly manager, talking transparency and free-market initiatives to end what might have been “the largest populist experiment” ...

This week, California’s state legislature approved a bill requiring the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by the year 2045. It’s a landmark for power sector decarbonization, and if Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill, it will require a transformation of the state’s energy system. California already gets 29 percent of its electricity from zero-carbon ...

The Indian central bank’s final tally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2016 demonetization drive, intended to take money derived from tax evasion out of circulation, showed that 99.3 percent of outlawed high-value banknotes had been returned. That’s a severe loss of face for officials, who had argued that holders of the cash would rather destroy it than return it to ...

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) took effect in 1994, it was widely regarded — by friend and foe alike — as an ambitious experiment in economic engineering. To advocates, it promised the benefits of stronger economic growth for its three member countries: Canada, Mexico and the United States. To its adversaries, it threatened the loss of well-paid ...