Opinion

When it comes to the unemployment rate and the stock market, lower is not always better. Investors cheered jobs report, which showed that the unemployment rate in May dropped to 3.8 percent. That was a shift from much of the rest of the year, when investors have reacted to strong earnings numbers and positive economic news with concerns that it ...

Country Garden Holdings Co. has a message for Asian debt junkies — the party’s over. China’s largest real estate developer may need to return to the dollar bond market after suspending a planned 20 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) sale on May 29. The firm, no stranger to the offshore world, already squeezed in $850 million of issuance in January, just ...

As US President Donald Trump lobs tariff threats at China, Mexico and Canada, one of the world’s biggest economies has been largely absent from his rhetoric. And yet, Japan stands to bear the brunt of many of them. Unlike its neighbor South Korea, which was exempted, Japan has been struck with levies on steel and aluminum by a Trump executive ...

Italian President Sergio Mattarella might think he has taken a principled stand in vetoing euroskeptic Paolo Savona as finance minister, effectively disallowing a government led by the Five Star Movement and the League. But in rejecting the choice of a popularly elected coalition, he may well have set in motion a financial crisis from which it will be hard to ...

Beware food companies relying on their bookkeeping rather than their cooking to keep investors satisfied. A number of food companies have recently been selling their IOUs to deal with the fact that their customers, namely giant retailers like Walmart Inc., are taking longer to pay. The sales bolster cash flows, but critics contend they can make the giant food companies’ ...

Trump has turned on longtime allies, labeling them a national security threat in order to levy 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. For neighbouring Mexico, this will affect some $3 billion in exports. While not insignificant, it is just a speck of the $300 billion-plus the nation sends north each year (for Canada, steel and aluminum ...

If you’re nostalgic for the 2008-09 financial crisis, you can cheer up. Another debacle may be on its way. Its epicenter would be Italy, which may threaten the rest of the world economy. Under the worst-case assumptions, Italy could abandon the euro — the single currency now used by 19 countries — and experience a full-blown financial meltdown that would ...

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he has said he wants to make trade “fair.” For too long, he argued, American companies and workers suffered as trading partners used tactics that stole jobs, damaged US industry and widened deficits. The implication was that he’d work to strip away the remaining tariffs and other hurdles that tilted the playing ...

However you regard the veracity of a short-seller’s allegations against Samsonite International SA, one thing is certain: Targeting a Massachusetts-based firm with a wide shareholder base seems to be a much a safer bet than going after the hordes of opaque Chinese companies in Hong Kong. The baggage company, whose hard-shell suitcases recall the glory days of flying, has become ...

About 42 million people received benefits in the 2017 fiscal year from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — still widely known as food stamps, although the paper coupons were replaced by debit cards more than a decade ago. That’s a lot of people! It’s almost 13 percent of the US population, which is down from a couple of years ago ...