Opinion

For Warren Buffett, when it rains, it pours — money, that is. The billionaire investor is grappling with an excessive cash buildup at his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and fewer acquisition opportunities to spend it on. The last thing he would seem to need is more cash. So it’s more than a little ironic that as Buffett searches up and down ...

With a year to go before Britain leaves the European Union, nervousness about Brexit’s impact on the asset-management industry is growing — and rightly so. The CFA Institute recently surveyed almost a thousand of its members, with most respondents employed by buy-side firms. About a quarter work in the UK, another 25 percent in other European Union countries and the ...

The US current account deficit grew a bit at the end of last year, to $128.2 billion in the fourth quarter from $101.5 billion in the third quarter, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That amounts to 2.6 percent of gross domestic product, which from the perspective of the past 15 years or so isn’t all ...

Ah, nostalgia. It keeps the Star Wars movie franchise ticking over and drives Bruce Springsteen concerts. It’s also a theme for Foxconn Technology Group’s strategy to wean itself off Apple Inc. First came the FIH Mobile Ltd. decision two years ago to bankroll a revival in the Nokia name. This week, fellow Foxconn affiliate FIT Hon Teng Ltd. announced it’s ...

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, tweeted up a storm on Thursday, reassuring internet users that they could reassert control over their data — and the web’s future — after the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandals. He’s right, but not necessarily in the way he imagines. “What can Web users do?” Berners-Lee wrote. “Get involved. Care about your ...

Quantitative easing (QE) saved us from the 2008 crash and jump-started a recovery. It also encouraged a build-up of one-sided risk in the financial system. Are markets and the economy ready for the exit? The sudden rise in volatility in February and March showed that even with strong growth fundamentals, financial markets remain vulnerable. Since 2008, there have been seven ...

Investors have gone gaga over Dropbox Inc. in its first few hours as a public company. It looks as if their enthusiasm has become overheated. Shares of Dropbox, the digital file-cabinet company, shot up about 39 percent last week from their initial sale price. That gives Dropbox a valuation of about $13 billion, including the value of shares held by ...

Facebook’s business model is pretty simple. It offers a free service to connect users with loved ones and others of similar interests. In return, it collects data about what its users do online (and, increasingly, offline). It then uses this data to sell targeted advertising. The whole thing works brilliantly. Yet the company — like so many others that profit ...

The omnibus spending bill currently before Congress includes a small but ill-conceived program that deserves to be noticed, then deleted. The EB-5 Regional Center program that gives visas to investors invites abuse and is failing to do what it’s meant to. Since 1990, foreigners who invest $1 million (or, in rural or high-unemployment areas, $500,000) in a new enterprise that ...

US President Donald Trump has finally carried out his threats on trade with China, announcing the start of a process that will lead to sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports and restrictions on Chinese investments. Trump hopes to compel a recalcitrant China to end a range of unfair business practices and open its market wider to US companies, thus reducing the ...