Opinion

Commodity funds are going soft. The investors who helped bid up the price of LME copper to a four-year high of $7,348 a metric ton last month are beating a path to the door. Holdings of investment funds in Chicago copper futures this month crashed to a net short position for the first time since the election of US President ...

Initial coin offerings are a hot topic, but the focus tends to miss the most important innovation. Attention naturally is on the 81 percent that are frauds, but the honest ones raised $7 billion for cryptocurrency initiatives in 2017. Those were predominately for double-block-chain ideas, which is blockchain funding to support a blockchain project. Frauds permeate crypto projects because they’re ...

The Trump administration claims that it has mostly met a court-ordered deadline to reunite migrant families separated at the border. Even to the extent that’s true, this is a story without happy endings. More than 700 of the nearly 3,000 children originally separated from family members remain in government hands, either because their parents have already been deported or they ...

Don’t accuse Mark Carney of being a currency manipulator (anymore). True, the Bank of England Governor has something to answer for. He announced an interest-rate cut in August 2016, just as the Brexit vote sent sterling reeling. That worsened the devaluation, and proved he was no friend of the currency. It was complicated. Now, they’re back on speaking terms. The ...

Losing Sergio Marchionne is a blow for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. For Ferrari NV, it’s a calamity. While investors had grown used to the idea that Marchionne would retire as Fiat CEO next year, they thought he’d be leading the sportscar maker until 2021 at least. Instead, Louis Camilleri — the former boss of Philip Morris International Inc — will ...

Macroeconomics tends to advance — or, at least, to change — one crisis at a time. The Great Depression discredited the idea that economies were basically self-correcting, and the following decades saw the development of Keynesian theory and the use of fiscal stimulus. The stagflation of the 1970s led to the development of real business cycle models, which saw recessions ...

“The Federal Reserve is meant to be independent of parochial political interests. But it’s got to operate — I think of this as a kind of band, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow — within the range of understanding of the public and the political system. You just can’t go do something that is just outside the bounds of what people can ...

A beleaguered Argentina had hosted the G-20 finance ministers to work out the agenda for their leaders’ December conclave in Buenos Aires. While officially focussed on infrastructure and the future of work, these more technical discussions were overshadowed by US tariff threats and President Donald Trump’s belligerence towards allies and the World Trade Organization. The US attack on the global ...

It hasn’t been Big Oil’s finest week. Exxon Mobil Corp does things bigger than most, and that also applies to missing expectations, it seems. It reported earnings and cash flow per share in the latest quarter that were both short of consensus forecasts by more than 20 percent. Production of oil and gas, especially the latter, fell heavily. As a ...

The hyped Twitter “recovery” has derailed. The company’s second-quarter financial report showed that the number of people using Twitter has stagnated and will decline, although the company said that’s at least in part because of intentional decisions to clean up its cesspool. Revenue growth, particularly in Twitter Inc’s vital US advertising market, is tepid for what was billed as a ...