Opinion

I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created. The way I see it, these guys — and they are mostly guys — were arbitrarily ...

I was at a hackers conference in Taipei a few years ago when I got talking to one of the country’s leading cybersecurity experts. I wanted to know the state of play in the ongoing cyber war between Taiwan and China. “There’s no war,” came the response. I was flummoxed. All day, stories had been flowing about attacks from China ...

By the scandalous standards of recent policy on immigration, it may seem like small potatoes. With a federal court demanding that separated parents and young children be reunited, and the Trump administration saying it doesn’t know where all of them are, instances of ordinary incompetence might seem hardly worth mentioning. Even so, the findings of a new Government Accountability Office ...

China is not just another front in President Donald Trump’s war on trade. Unlike Mexico, Canada, Europe and other targets of the president, China will be a source of economic conflict for years to come, long after the tariff level on soybeans has been settled. Like the rivalry with the Soviet Union, economic competition with China may form a cold ...

Hong Kong’s banks are finally raising mortgage rates. This won’t stem price gains in the world’s most expensive city for real estate. Already up 14 percent this year, Hong Kong’s home prices now overshadow those of New York and London relative to incomes. A key reason behind the unstoppable gains: The big banks, flush with liquidity, have held off passing ...

Mazda Motor Corp’s struggle to save the internal combustion engine from extinction threatens to choke in a cloud of faulty emissions tests. It may not be the only casualty: The widening global emissions scandal perhaps says as much about badly designed standards as the failings of automakers. Mazda has eschewed the industry’s rush to develop electric vehicles, seeking to prove ...

When all is said and done, President Trump’s trade war may be fated to fail. There are many reasons why. One is that the target countries — prominently, China, Japan and Germany — won’t accede to his demands. This is already happening. Another threat is a backlash among US firms, hurt by tariffs that raise their products’ prices. This, too, ...

Google may be about to pair all that data it has on users’ web browsing with the ads displayed on public billboards. Creepy? Maybe. Inevitable? Almost certainly. The Alphabet Inc unit is in talks in Germany about pushing into out-of-home advertising – billboards in stations, shopping centers and shop windows – according to Wirtschafts Woche. The move would be a ...

Want to know what Amazon.com Inc. will be doing in physical retail tomorrow? Look at what is happening in China today. If you’d taken this advice, you wouldn’t have been surprised when the behemoth spent $13.7 billion last year buying Whole Foods. Eighteen months earlier Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. had launched Hema, a technologically advanced blend of online grocery shopping, ...

In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, regulators around the world have taken steps which, they argue, have greatly strengthened the resilience of the financial system. Buoyant asset prices and rising bank shares suggest that investors largely believe them. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain. That will only become clear in a real downturn, rather than ...