Opinion

No one really knows how to predict recessions. Despite the massive financial returns that would accrue to anyone who had a good way of spotting downturns before they happen, macroeconomic forecasters are unable to do this with any reliability. And if professional forecasters can’t succeed in the high-stakes world of the financial industry, the chances of a pundit such as ...

Facebook insists that people can trust it to manage its giant social network in a way that doesn’t undermine democracy. I say verify: Let’s send in an army of scientists to study its role in the upcoming 2018 elections. There’s been too little research into how Facebook influenced the last election, even though there’s plenty of reason to think it ...

The UK government has all but approved Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take full control of Sky Plc. That’s good news for the satellite broadcaster’s shareholders. It’s also a sign that even the most controversial foreign offers for British companies have a fighting chance of success. UK Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said he will clear the bid by Murdoch’s 21st Century ...

America is easing open the gates for Chinese acquirers. A key (and opaque) US national security panel gave a real estate firm the all-clear to purchase Genworth Financial Inc., an insurer specializing in long-term care, after the Beijing-based company gave assurances on data privacy. The weekend nod from the Com­mit­tee on For­eign In­vest­ment in the US for China Oceanwide Holdings ...

One reason the US and China can’t figure out how to negotiate on trade may be that the Americans are making two sets of demands that are antithetical to each other, without even realizing it. On one side are threatened sanctions targeting the Made in China 2025 program of technology development and those against ZTE Corp. The headline tariffs, sometimes ...

It’s time the cryptocurrency community got its act together. In this relatively new industry, hacks and frauds have been greeted with a shrug and largely dismissed as part of the process of building a superior financial system. True believers are convinced that Bitcoin and its siblings will overthrow fiat currencies and the existing structures to which they’re attached. At their ...

The meetings of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) this week are likely to show that these systemically important institutions continue to gradually move away from the policy approach they adopted to contain the trauma of the global financial crisis from 2010 to 2017. Yet the two institutions are making this shift at different speeds, and that ...

The trustees for Social Security and Medicare issued their annual reports last week. This is cause for discouragement because it reminds us how much we’ve mortgaged the country’s future to spending for older Americans. Already, Social Security and Medicare constituted 42 percent of federal spending in 2017, say the trustees. If they had included Medicaid, the share would have exceeded ...

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) has nearly $1.5 trillion in assets and a legion of external asset managers running its portfolio. The GPIF sees itself as a ‘super-long-term investor’ with the goal of a century or more of sustainable investment and outflows. Managing money for that long is a matter of stewardship, not just picking assets — and in ...

If Germany has too many banks and beleaguered lender Deutsche Bank AG is too reliant on its trading businesses, wouldn’t a merger with rival Commerzbank AG fix two issues at once? Probably — but for Deutsche’s chairman to bring it up now is as ill-timed as cracking a joke at a funeral. His bank needs to address its problems first ...