Opinion

If you want to know where cryptocurrencies are in their development, keep an eye on fees. When a new “investment” comes along, investors are often too busy counting their anticipated bounty to care about cost. Shrewd purveyors predictably seize the opportunity to charge excessive fees. But reality inevitably falls short of investors’ expectations, and the focus eventually turns to how ...

One of the more mystifying features of recent economic debate is how many people seem unbothered by the very real possibility of an old-fashioned trade war. Donald Trump, of course, relishes the possibility of such a battle — as he would, no doubt, any war he didn’t have to fight personally. Naturally, he’s convinced that the US would ‘win’ one. ...

The retail industry has plenty of reason to be upbeat in these early months of 2018. The holiday season was a roaring one, and Amazon.com Inc. didn’t claim all the spoils. Many big-name chains fared well, and consumer sentiment remains strong, suggesting the good times will keep rolling. But stepping back for a longer view of retail’s prospects, I’d caution ...

In Professor Dowell’s Head, a 1925 science fiction novel by Alexander Belyayev that was a must read when I was a kid, a dying scientist bequeaths his body to a colleague who then revives just the heart and the head. In this form, Professor Dowell lives on but hates it. The life of British physicist Stephen Hawking, who died on ...

There have been numerous estimates of Brexit’s cost to the UK but fewer similar ones for the European Union. But calculations are gradually surfacing, and while Europe’s costs are serious, it’s easy to see why the EU has a stronger negotiating position. Last week, the New York-based management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and the London-based law firm Clifford Chance published ...

Too much money and nothing to spend it on. That’s the problem facing cash-heavy private equity firms. They should look to Asia for answers. The region had a boom year for private equity transactions in 2017, with deals totaling $159 billion, up 41 percent from 2016 and topping the $133 billion record set in 2015, data from Bain & Co. ...

We are about a year away from the UK’s formal exit from the European Union, its biggest trading partner, and we are none the wiser as to how it will work in practice. Every day that goes by without a politically acceptable solution — one that both sides can sell to their respective constituents — leaves companies and banks with ...

Lawrence Kudlow appears to be President Donald Trump’s pick to become the top White House economic adviser. At first glance, this television personality is an odd choice to lead the National Economic Council. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad one. Kudlow is an avid supply-sider who never met a tax cut he didn’t like. He’s famously claimed that virtually ...

One of the themes of this economic cycle has been that tech startups have stayed private for a long time, choosing to raise money via venture capital rather than going public. When a downturn inevitably arrives, some may regret that. As prior cycles have shown, even if good startups technically can go public in a bad market, they generally don’t ...

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to think of India’s 21 state-run lenders as one gigantic bad bank that’s financially fragile, operationally weak, and forever in need of relief and rescue. But in trying to blame the banking supervisor for the latest manifestation of the lenders’ Inspector Clouseau-like ineptitude — a $2 billion scam at the second-largest — Finance Minister Arun ...