Opinion

China is hoping to become the Detroit of the battery-powered electric-vehicle industry. Sales of EVs are expected to reach 1 million this year alone, and the government has big plans for expansion. But this welcome trend comes with a perplexing side effect: China is now using up more lithium-ion batteries than anywhere else in the world. What to do with ...

It is March 2009. The American economy is rapidly collapsing. The previous month, payroll jobs had dropped by a staggering 650,000. The grim outlook stokes gallows humour. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke receives a call from a top Fed official. “Do you want some good news?” the official asks. “Please,” Bernanke responds. “Call somebody else.” In this desperate climate, the ...

How much have benchmark US interest rates risen lately? You may think the correct answer is 25 basis points, or 0.25 percentage point. That’s the amount by which the US Federal Reserve raised its target for overnight interbank rates in December, the only official increase in the past nine months. Unofficially, though, borrowing costs have gone up by another 35 ...

With the threat of city driving bans looming across Europe, people who want to know whether it still makes sense to buy a diesel vehicle shouldn’t count on any help from the autos industry’s biggest beast. That’s the only conclusion to draw from comments by Volkswagen AG’s boss on Monday that diesel cars would soon enjoy a “renaissance” as people ...

The exchange-traded fund juggernaut that’s transformed the US investing landscape is just starting to accelerate into Europe. But there’s a risk that misguided efforts by European Union regulators to deal with the aftershocks of Brexit will stunt the market’s potential. After growing by more than 40 percent last year, Europe’s ETF industry added another 7 percent in January alone. It ...

The manufacturing mini-renaissance continues. Over the past year, according to today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sector has added 222,000 jobs, resuming a recovery that had paused in 2015 and 2016 amid strength in the dollar and weakness in the US oil and gas industry. As is somewhat apparent from the previous chart and is clear ...

Picture a bank that lends $1 billion to small businesses in 12 months, holds $150 billion in corporate bonds, runs the world’s largest money-market fund, offers mobile payments and credit cards, and gives customers cash balances that can be topped up across thousands of homely bricks-and-mortar outlets. Except it’s not really a bank at all, but a technology firm. Google ...

China looks set to get a new central bank governor this month. Incumbent Zhou Xiaochuan has seen it all during his 15 years in office: China’s surge to become the second-largest economy, the global financial crisis, ending the yuan’s fixed peg to the dollar and winning the currency inclusion in the IMF’s reserve basket. For all those changes, the People’s ...

“Trade wars,” President Donald Trump recently declared on Twitter, “are good, and easy to win.” But it’s questionable whether the president’s proposed tariffs — a tax of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum — will be a war or an act of friendly fire. As I recently wrote, tariffs are generally not a good way ...

The deepening Moritomo Gakuen school land-sale scandal could put an end to Abenomics. Japan’s Finance Minister Taro Aso refused to step down on Monday after it was revealed staff at his ministry had ordered the alteration of documents linked to the sale of government-owned property to the nationalist school operator. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he wants Aso to take ...