Opinion

The secret use of Facebook data in the US presidential election has forced governments and consumers to think about how such companies gather and profit from personal information — a major concern overdue for close attention. This scrutiny may be the beginning of the end of the unregulated growth of Silicon Valley. Tech companies and their investors may shudder at ...

Despite sky-high housing prices, Silicon Valley remains the vital center of the US tech industry. Once an industry takes root in a particular place, it’s very hard to pull it away. Which makes it all the more important to understand: Why did Silicon Valley become Silicon Valley in the first place? One prominent theory is that California’s culture encouraged a ...

Here’s a new twist in the Robert Mueller saga: A former top Senate staffer for Attorney General Jeff Sessions is nearing confirmation to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Should his appointment worry people who want to protect the special counsel’s independence? As with any issue involving Mueller and the Trump White House, the answer reflects the supercharged atmosphere surrounding ...

Forecasting the long-run return on equities is one of the key challenges in financial planning. Jeremy Siegel, the author of “Stocks for the Long Run,” wrote that he had examined 210 years of stock returns and found that “the real return on a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks has averaged 6.6 percent per year.” Public pension funds make similar assumptions. ...

It looks a victory for aggrieved bondholders. Aviva Plc has had enough bad press and has kicked controversial plans to cancel its preference share class into the long grass. The decision isn’t entirely charitable. The British insurer may also have been influenced by the fact that likely cost of issuing new perpetual debt was beginning to tick up. But this ...

As part of its continuing campaign to prevent China from stealing American intellectual property, President Donald Trump’s administration is considering restrictions on the number of Chinese citizens enrolled at US colleges and universities. Targeting foreign students will undermine US competitiveness, not enhance it. Of the 1 million foreign nationals enrolled at US schools, nearly one-third are from China — double ...

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence — or ‘robots’ in common parlance – is whether they will make human workers obsolete. ...

Communication received loud and clear. The Bank of England (BOE) did just enough to keep interest rate expectations alive for a hike in its key interest rate in May to 0.75 percent — and beyond. The switch to a 7-2 vote at March 22 policy decision, with the most voluble hawks Michael Saunders and Ian McCafferty reverting to wanting an ...

I think I understand why Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t publicly responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He’s stuck in a catch-22. Any fix for Facebook’s previous big problem — fake news — would make the current big problem with data harvesting worse. As a media company and one of Americans’ top sources of information, Facebook’s de facto ...

“This alert (from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation) provides information on Russian government actions targeting US Government entities as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors” — Joint DHS and FBI memorandum, March 15, 2018 One curiosity of the cyber age is that the American public ...