Opinion

As Donald Trump works to kick Japan’s automakers out of their largest market, they may want to set their sights on an even bigger prize — China. Authorities in the US are considering making imported cars meet stricter environmental requirements, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration and industry officials it didn’t identify. This sort of a non-tariff barrier would ...

How the mood changes. Malaysia is now seen as the best growth story among emerging Southeast Asian markets. Year-to-date, foreign investors bought a net $635 million of the country’s shares, while pulling money out of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index has outperformed its peers with an 8 percent rally this year in dollar terms. ...

The Bank of England (BOE) has often had to fend off charges that years of easy money worsened inequality. It recently released a study concluding the opposite: that nine years of asset purchases that pumped 375 billion pounds ($527 billion) into a faltering world economy didn’t widen inequality after all: Whatever the marginal impact of the extraordinary period of accommodative ...

The past three decades of minimal real wage growth have led some people to wonder why they haven’t gotten ahead. And in much the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, con artists hate missing an opportunity to separate suckers from their money. This might explain why we see a special class of self-help gurus — none of whom were ...

If you are looking for examples of companies that do well at public relations, start with what determines personal trust. We often trust people we have met, interacted with and maybe done business with. I think of community banks as enjoying relatively high levels of trust. Millions of Americans have walked through the doors of their local banks and dealt ...

Trade war! Those dread words are on everyone’s lips (and electronic equivalents) as President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping throw out a series of rapidly escalating tariff threats: President Donald Trump fired a shot at China’s plans to dominate strategic technologies, proposing tariffs on 1,300 goods from semiconductors to flamethrowers. China hit back hard today, targeting politically sensitive ...

Two years ago, Japan passed a milestone rare in world history except in times of war, famine or natural disaster: Its population began to shrink. And not only is it shrinking, but its average age is also rising. This trend is creating societal challenges, not least the phenomenon of elderly people passing away unknown, even unnoticed. This may not sound ...

Hitching a ride on Tesla Inc. these days seems precarious at best, especially for its sole battery supplier Panasonic Corp. Shares of the Japanese company plunged as much as 9 percent after a spate of Tesla bad-news stories over the past few weeks. First, the US electric-car maker reported yet another fatal crash, then a shortfall in production targets for ...

From all the hysteria Down Under, you might think Australia is at risk of invasion — by Chinese cash. China’s economy certainly is increasingly influential, but the regulatory backlash from Canberra has all the makings of a self-inflicted wound. Australia has announced limitations on foreign purchases of power utilities and land. In case anyone missed the message, the man who ...

Donald Trump said he got a ‘great deal’ in renegotiating America’s bilateral trade agreement with South Korea. This is the first trade pact Trump has successfully revised, and it reflects the intellectual core of his America First approach to trade: The US can use its great economic and geopolitical leverage to drive harder bargains with weaker powers. That approach appears ...