Opinion

There are many good economic reasons why President Donald Trump is wrong to obsess over the US trade deficit with China. One is that this bilateral deficit isn’t as severe as he thinks — and, in any case, the structural factors that caused the imbalance in the first place are changing. Before launching a US-China trade war, the White House ...

Hong Kong has used UBS Group AG to send a harsh message to investment banks: Take your job as a gateway to initial public offerings seriously. With deals starting to boom again and the city’s exchange planning to allow dual-class shares, regulators are right to adopt a tougher stance. The Securities and Futures Commission suspended UBS from sponsoring Hong Kong ...

The March 4 Italian elections have produced a lot of drama, an equity-market selloff, and as yet no sign of a government — but in the bond market, stability should prevail. Ten-year Italian yields have held close to 2 percent all year so far. Of course, there was always going to be a benefit from the European Central Bank’s (ECB) quantitative ...

President Donald Trump’s decision to quash an overseas bid for Qualcomm Inc. was almost certainly the right thing to do. That it came with little warning and not much explanation, however, suggests some significant flaws in the way the US evaluates such deals. Broadcom Ltd., based in Singapore, had made an unsolicited $117 billion offer to acquire Qualcomm, a leading ...

Here’s a useful lesson: Don’t believe what CEOs say, only what they do. This is what Uber’s top executive said three weeks ago: “We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively,” according to an account of Dara Khosrowshahi’s press briefing in New Delhi. “Right now the plan for Southeast Asia is to go forward, lean ...

The Women in Finance Charter, an initiative from the UK Treasury to improve gender balance in the finance industry, just released its first progress report. Frankly, it makes for depressing reading. But there’s a glimmer of hope in one of the remedies it proposes. Signatories to the charter include asset management firms such as Schroders Plc, banks like Barclays Plc, ...

Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass ...

It shouldn’t be a problem that incoming National Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow isn’t a trained economist possessing an advanced degree. It isn’t even necessarily disqualifying that he’s known as a famously bad pundit on financial matters. Neither shortcoming makes it impossible for him to do an excellent job leading the National Economic Council (NEC). But another skill is absolutely central ...

Li Ka-shing’s retirement from the empire he built over 68 years marks the end of an era for Hong Kong’s dominant billionaires and, in important ways, for the territory itself. A wartime refugee who started with nothing when the then-British colony was relatively poor and struggling, Li rose with other tycoons of his time as the city developed economically under ...

Every day that draws closer to the April 4 deadline for British companies to declare their gender pay gaps brings a pickup in the number of reports on file, and these cement the sad truth that men tend to get paid more than women. Only about a fifth of the companies who must submit their wage data have done so. ...