Opinion

I feel like I’ve had illnesses that lasted longer than Tesla Inc.’s completely serious process of considering a buyout. Or maybe it just reminded me of being ill: the disorientation, the fever dreams, the sense that, surely, it must all end soon. And end it did, in the most apt way possible: a blog post saying that, after all of ...

Inflation is back. What do we do about it? For starters: Don’t ignore it. The latest consumer price index (CPI) — the government’s best-known inflation indicator — reported a 2.9 percent increase from July 2017. The last time the year-over-year gain was higher was in December 2011. Though hardly a cause for panic, it suggests intensifying price and wage pressures ...

Analysts are trying urgently to evaluate the potential impact of a full-fledged trade war on the Chinese economy. This typically involves estimating how much various tariff scenarios will reduce China’s GDP growth, with current estimates ranging from the minimal, 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points, to the substantial — 2 percentage points. This is probably the right way to evaluate the ...

Getting two management teams to agree on a deal to create the world’s largest industrial gases group was hard enough. Finalising the combination of Praxair Inc and Linde AG is proving harder still. The former, in particular, should be asking if the benefits really are worth it. The possibility of a transaction surfaced in August 2016. An agreement to create ...

Global investors are positioned for a coordinated tightening of monetary policy by the world’s major central banks. Although the US Federal Reserve is already far down that path, the others are just getting started. The European Central Bank is set to end its bond purchase program by year-end. The Bank of England is leaning towards hiking interest rates for only ...

As negotiators from the UK and the European Union meet in Brussels, Brexit is said to be entering its endgame. This isn’t an ordinary endgame though: All the major pieces are still on the board and pretty much the full range of potential outcomes — from no deal to no Brexit, and everything in between — remain live possibilities. Mapping ...

Which are the most lucrative airline routes? The ones that fly tourists and executives between global capitals on sparkling new planes, accompanied by in-flight movies and lie-flat beds? Or the ones that hop around the boondocks on ancient turboprops with the seat stuffing coming out? Of course it’s the latter. Every business knows that you can charge the highest prices ...

What exactly has gone wrong, and when and why? The open, democratic world order based on egalitarian rights and the rule of law — liberalism, for lack of a better term — is under increasing pressure. The signs, serious and less so, are everywhere. The trend has now hit so many nations that the explanation has to be global. Social ...

Governments, seemingly eager to supply their critics with ammunition, constantly validate historian Robert Conquest: The behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Consider North Carolina’s intervention in the medical-devices market. Born in India, Dr Gajendra Singh is an American citizen and a surgeon in Winston-Salem ...

Whenever Amazon. com Inc eyes expansion into a new industry, the stalwarts of that space shudder. A Reuters report that the e-commerce giant has been talking to insurers about introducing a price comparison website in the UK was no different. Incumbents Moneysupermarket.com Group Plc and GoCompare.com Group Plc fell as much as 4.7 percent and 10 percent respectively. But for ...