Opinion

Not all tech stars are equal. While US giants from Apple Inc. to Amazon.com Inc. march to or through the $1 trillion valuation mark, China’s darlings are getting dumped. The groups started to diverge two months ago, and the big American tech stocks have outperformed their Chinese counterparts by 19 percentage points since then. With more than $18 billion of ...

The collapse in Argentina’s currency underlines two facts about global finance that are well understood yet far too easily forgotten. First, the effort to normalize US monetary policy after a decade of extraordinary monetary stimulus has put many other economies, especially those at risk for domestic reasons, under greater financial pressure. Second, once a crisis of confidence gets going, it ...

The US reached a preliminary trade agreement with Mexico that addresses several American grievances. A similar deal with Canada appears to be on track. These breakthroughs, combined with an easing of tensions with the European Union, could allow a more coordinated approach to the toughest trade problem of them all: reaching an agreement with China. This is good news for ...

Apparently there’s a pot of gold in Indian retail, and big players from around the world want to dip in. Many of them are likely to come up empty-handed. The volume of high-profile announcements in the sector recently has been remarkable. Walmart Inc. led with a $16 billion deal to buy Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd., India’s largest e-commerce retailer; ...

Electric vehicles, prized for their acceleration, are speeding up. Bloomberg NEF estimates the global electric vehicle market will this week pass the milestone of 4 million sold to date, according to a report published recently. Having taken about five years to get to the first million, the last million were sold in about six months. Four million vehicles sold in ...

There’s no doubt that the US economy is in a boom. The Conference Board is reporting the highest levels of job satisfaction in more than a decade. This is probably because of a tight labour market — the ratio between the unemployment level and the number of job vacancies is at its lowest level in a half-century: A broader measure, ...

The best thing that can be said about President Trump’s latest trade initiative is that it moves the US back towards the kind of agreements Trump unwisely blew up when he became president. So, two cheers for Trump’s revamped free-trade agreement with Mexico and the one he may get soon with Canada. He wants to rebrand the package, of course, ...

Maybe it’s utilities Elon Musk should have been courting for his take-Tesla-private fling. In a power-sector workshop convened by Bloomberg New Energy Finance in June, more than two-thirds of industry attendees said they think US electricity demand will have peaked by 2030. Looking at the past decade, hooking up millions of vehicles to the grid may offer the best route ...

In the first quarter of this year, after-tax US corporate profits as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis went up a lot (at an 8.2 percent annualised rate over the previous quarter), but pretax profits only went up a little (1.2 percent). That raised questions of whether all those great first-quarter earnings reports were mainly just the result of ...

It seemed like good news for Europe when Sharon Donnery, deputy governor of the Irish central bank, made an application to be the top banking supervisor at the European Central Bank (ECB). She is widely regarded as extremely competent, has experience in important areas like nonperforming loans, and is a woman in an institution that badly needs women in leadership ...