Opinion

It was only a decade ago that Nokia OYJ’s smartphone factory near Chennai was seen as the prototype solution for India’s chronic problem of too few women in the workforce. That unit, which at peak production boasted 8,000 permanent employees — 72 percent of whom were women – got left out of a global sale of the Finnish company’s mobile ...

The disingenuous way companies are attempting to comply with the letter, not the spirit, of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation is only part of the problem with the new privacy rule, which goes into effect May 25. For publishers already forced to accept Google’s near monopoly on programmatic advertising on their sites, the new regulation could make things ...

From Scotland, where Adam Smith pioneered systematic thinking about economics, comes an adjective, ‘carnaptious,’ that fits people who are allergic to economic euphoria. It means cantankerous. Let’s think carnaptiously about this fact: The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds recently rose briefly to 3 percent, and soon may move above this. This is more than evidence of the economy’s strength. ...

The UK has bowed to public concern over illicit money flowing through offshore tax havens. Territories such as the British Virgin Islands will have to publish open registers of company ownership by 2020. It’s a welcome step, considering the UK’s historical hands-off approach, but transparency must be followed by accountability to produce long-lasting change. First, the good news: an open ...

Wayfair Inc.’s latest earnings results show just how much of a disruptor it’s been in the home-furnishings industry. The company reported that its retail net revenue was $1.4 billion, a 48 percent increase over a year earlier. It notched 11.8 million active customers in the quarter, a 33 percent increase over last year. It is a veritable market-share-grabbing machine, and ...

Inconsequential tariffs don’t cause trade wars; the US bankrupting China’s technology companies just might. Trade rhetoric between the countries will likely escalate, but the potential bankruptcy of ZTE Corp. after the US banned exports to the company last month could turn out to be the shot that triggers the war. China would likely respond with a strong reprisal against US ...

I have great respect for Apple, but I refuse to buy its $1,000 phones. Instead, I use a $250 Android device with a long battery life. In the emerging big data-based economy, however, that could cost me in ways I can’t even predict. A recent paper by Tobias Berg of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany and ...

Stephen and Stitt — the iconic HSBC Holdings Plc lions — are crouching and ready to pounce. Adjusted profit from Asian operations jumped 8.5 percent from a year earlier to $4.76 billion in the first-quarter results showed last week. That’s even as ho-hum performance everywhere else dragged down return on equity to an annualized rate of 7.5 percent, a drop ...

A friend of mine who is a bit of a climate-change skeptic once challenged me with this question: If climate change is such a pressing danger, why haven’t coastal real estate prices crashed? It’s a fair question. If financial markets are even close to efficient, and if everyone knows climate change is about to flood the coasts, then it stands ...

The UK isn’t doing as badly as many predicted since it decided to exit the European Union in 2016. Employment rates remain high. Exports, which had surged to records in 2016, held up nicely in 2017. But it’s not doing particularly well either. Since the financial crisis a decade ago, output per hour in the UK has remained essentially unchanged. ...