Opinion

Kraft Heinz Co. represents all that is wrong with aspects of corporate America. So why does Warren Buffett like the stock? The US markets and economy may be holding up, but there’s a corner of the business world with an unsettling combination of factors: few growth opportunities, resistance to new customer trends, ruthless cost-cutting to make up for revenue shortfalls, ...

The Treasury Department is apparently looking into using its regulatory power to change the way taxes on capital gains are assessed. The idea is to confine the taxes to real, inflation-adjusted gains, not nominal gains, as now. There’s a particle of sense in this notion, but it’s buried miles deep in bad faith and bad economics. The change would amount ...

Apple Inc has been a profit geyser well before it was valued at the $1 trillion milestone the company reached . Even Warren Buffett is impressed. “It is an unbelievable company,” the legendary investor and Apple stockholder said in May as he marveled that Apple earns almost twice as much as the second-most profitable company in the US. Buffett is ...

Almost three decades ago, the Texan oilman T. Boone Pickens attempted to charge into a Japanese boardroom. He had accumulated around one-third of the company – worth almost $1 billion at the time – yet a seat at the table eluded him. There was nothing to force the directors to accept him. Japan Inc has come a long way since ...

Tesla Inc announced its second-quarter results. Those results, along with Elon Musk’s apologies to analysts for his rudeness three months earlier, pushed its stock price up and 2025 bond yields down. During the earnings call, Musk and his colleagues said “improve” or “improvements” 14 times in describing everything from Tesla’s production lines to its in-car computing to its gross margins. ...

A lot of Republicans in Congress will tell you that they support President Donald Trump but disagree with him about trade. There is, however, a small group of conservatives who have found a more ingenious method for reconciling their support for free trade with their enthusiasm for the president. They have remade him into a fellow free trader in their ...

When the Permian basin sneezes, the US oil and gas sector catches a cold. More accurately, the Permian has a nasty dose of congestion. Also more accurately, some in the industry have stro-nger immune systems than others. Exploration and production stocks that sold off in mid-May, as pipeline constraints started hitting the price of Permian barrels, have staged something of ...

A funny thing happens when the economy booms: Investors crawl out on thinner and thinner limbs. It’s happening right now in the bond markets, where the only part that is lucrative is usually the least appealing to all but the nerviest players: distressed state and local governments with the lowest credit ratings (or none at all). Think of bankrupt Puerto ...

Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, told Bloomberg Markets this week that predicting the pound would fall after a leave win in the Brexit referendum was “probably the easiest call” in the past 25 years of macroeconomics. Sadly for him, setting monetary policy ahead of Britain’s departure from the EU next March is proving much harder. The Bank is ...

Boring is a good look for Apple. The company that was once a seemingly impossible combination of rapid growth and eye-popping profits has settled into a new phase of life. It’s now clear that Apple Inc. won’t return to the iPhone-selling mania of a few years ago. Higher product prices and the regular introduction of new gadgets are patching over ...