Opinion

This seems to be the year when Americans hit the pause button on the advance of technology in their daily lives and grapple with how we got here and where we’re going. My Bloomberg colleague Tyler Cowen has written about a looming clash between the values of Washington, DC, and the values of the San Francisco Bay Area. They are ...

The US president has repeatedly attacked one of the most successful American companies ever, Amazon.com Inc. Several times he has taken to Twitter to excoriate the giant online retailer, whose chief Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, a newspaper that has published a steady stream of articles that have proven embarrassing to Donald Trump and his administration. I will leave ...

The global economy is on the mend — but will the recovery be quashed by too much worldwide debt? Just last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) raised its forecast for world economic growth to 3.9 percent for both 2018 and 2019. Most advanced societies — the United States, Japan, Europe — grew faster in 2017 than expected, and the ...

Indonesia, home to roughly 6 percent of Facebook Inc.’s users, isn’t happy with the social-media giant. Officials there are even threatening to shut the service down after its latest egregious privacy scandal. That sounds like an ominous threat — but it’s empty. In Indonesia, as across the developing world, Facebook is no longer just a platform for sharing photos and ...

Qualcomm Inc. needs to start working on a plan B more exciting than share buybacks. China’s Ministry of Commerce is pushing back on Qualcomm’s proposed $45 billion-plus purchase of NXP Semiconductors NV, forcing the chipmaker to refile its request for approval. The deal process is now in its 18th month; put a different way, the NXP takeover was announced before ...

American companies are doing much more in China than the US trade deficit suggests. It’s their greatest weakness. The deficit, the difference between what the US imports from China and what it exports there, widened to $375 billion last year. It sounds like a lot. President Donald Trump and others take it as evidence that the relationship between the world’s ...

We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com Inc. is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer? “Both” is the obvious answer, but to this Amazon aficionado that answer is incomplete. The pay figure, which was ...

Tammie Jo Shults is commercial aviation’s latest hero. So why aren’t there more pilots like her? The Southwest Airlines Co. captain, praised for her cool handling of a depressurization and emergency landing in Philadelphia after the Boeing Co. 737’s engine blew apart mid-flight, is still an anomaly in the airline industry. While women make up roughly half of cabin crew, ...

Apple Inc. is changing, and everyone knows it except Apple itself. Apple executives consistently fail to be straightforward about significant technology trends and how they affect the company. The biggest of the big trends: Growth in the smartphone market is gone, at least for now. The likeliest buyers now own at least one of the devices. Smartphone owners are holding ...

History is what we make of it — and sometimes we make a real hash. I take as my text for the sermon that follows an op-ed essay in The New York Times this week by Times’ columnist David Leonhardt. The headline tells it all: ‘Democrats, the Real Fiscal Conservatives.’ Are you kidding? It is certainly true, as Leonhardt argues, ...