Opinion

The outlook for US debt and deficits isn’t pretty. The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office are for $1 trillion annual budget shortfalls. On top of that, Treasury debt held by the public will almost double to $27.1 trillion over the next 10 years as the US steps up its borrowing to finance the deficits. Perhaps the worst part ...

A popular trade that worked for years is losing its shine. US multinationals – the missionaries of globalization that sell toothpaste, fast food and smartphones to consumers from China to India – have been investor darlings since the 2013 taper tantrum. Buying large diversified companies offered a smart way to gain exposure to these fast-growing young markets, removing the need ...

I’ve long been a critic of Apple, but today I give up: It’s the perfect tech company for this day and age, an example to the rest of Silicon Valley. After Apple’s latest results announcement, one could knock it yet again for its stable dependence on a single mature product — the iPhone. That product delivered 62.2 percent of the ...

At this point, the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) makes for an easy rhetorical target. Precious few economists and financial professionals are willing to stand up in public anymore and assert that financial markets produce the best estimate of fundamental asset values. A series of enormous bubbles, plus decades of outsized profits for hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies, has turned into ...

Boeing Co. is signaling it won’t take on extra baggage in its pursuit of a bigger services division, but it will still have to pay up to build one. The planemaker acquired KLX Inc. for $63 a share, or about $4.25 billion including debt. The catch is that Boeing is only buying KLX’s aerospace business, which distributes parts and provides ...

In just about two years, Allergan PLC has gone from a pharma darling on the verge of a massively lucrative Pfizer Inc. buyout to something of a pariah. Its stock has fallen 38 percent in the past nine months. Shareholders are reportedly recruiting activists. On its first-quarter earnings call on Monday, Allergan said it is in the midst of an ...

President Donald Trump has made clear his view that the US doesn’t need any more immigrants. The mystery is why a veteran of the hospitality business would be so inhospitable to tourists, traveling executives, students and other visitors. Consider the State Department’s ill-advised plan to impose new screening requirements on the roughly 14 million people who apply each year for ...

From about the beginning of 2017, even skeptics had to admit, India looked to be recovering from a growth slowdown. Most dramatically, in the last two quarters for which data is available, investment in physical capital — which had long been too low for growth to recover — increased by 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively. In the first two ...

Finally. Get used to hearing that word a lot when people talk about the merger of Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. For SoftBank Group Corp. and its founder Masayoshi Son, that sigh of relief also needs a rejoinder: now what? In addition to successfully selling his unprofitable US telco, Son this year is on track to list the company’s ...

There are numerous takes on what made the Western world special during the era after World War II, including an especially large middle class, many years of peace and American hegemony. I’d like to nominate another candidate, namely that there was a rough correspondence between the major risks out there and the risks that government could afford to insure us ...