Opinion

Ignore the noise. China’s long-delayed property tax is probably still at least three years away, despite a flurry of recent announcements. The concept of a levy on homeowners collected by local authorities is certainly gaining currency. Premier Li Keqiang said China “will steadily push forward legislation” in his annual report to the National People’s Congress. The tax may be based ...

The central issue in British politics is not, as you might have thought, Brexit. It’s housing. New analysis shows that Britain’s long-festering housing shortages contributed to the 2017 election that cost the Conservatives their majority. While Brexit divisions cut across party lines, Britain’s housing problems overwhelmingly benefit Labour. Now, it seems the government may finally be grasping the extent of ...

With moderate economic adviser Gary Cohn set to exit the White House, and US President Donald Trump reportedly mulling broad curbs on imports from China, fears of a 1930s-style trade war are spiking. Indeed, for the past several months, a potential US-China trade battle has ranked as one of the key macro investment risks of 2018. Given Trump’s predilections and ...

If it’s truly serious about cars, Apple Inc. should buy Aston Martin Holdings Ltd. This may sound wacky, but bear with me. For the prestige British carmaker, there’s clear mileage in the idea. Its owners are already planning an initial public offering and its CEO wants a “big brother” partner to help him keep pace with autonomous vehicle projects at ...

No one associates insurance with fireworks. The same goes for the preference share market. Mix them together, though, and the results are combustible — and will have far-reaching consequences. Aviva Plc this week lobbed a rocket at its preference shareholders. The UK insurer will consider cancelling its “irredeemable” preference shares and paying back investors at par value — about 450 ...

When President Donald Trump entered office, it was clear that policies boosting energy production would take precedence over those protecting the environment. The administration’s 2019 budget and its addendum proposed sweeping rollbacks to programs designed to limit environmental pollution and mitigate the effects of climate change, while slashing funds devoted to research on renewable energy. Yet despite this setback, these ...

My first graduate microeconomics class didn’t start with any grand theories or mathematical proofs. It started with a demonstration. The professor marched us down to a computer lab, divided us into groups of six, and had us participate in a simulated market. Amazingly, the price of the virtual commodity we were trading quickly converged to a single value and stayed ...

Banking regulators, and the lawmakers who set regulations, would make terrible comedians. Their timing is almost always way off. The most notorious example is the regulatory “streamlining” that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed in March 2008 after the financial crisis had essentially already started. But there are others, like the 2004 switch that allowed broker-dealers to pile up debt. There ...

Travis Kalanick, the Uber founder, has set up a fund to invest in companies involved in ‘large-scale job creation.’ That would seem to be right up his alley: Uber has created lots of jobs. The question, though, is whether they are the kind of jobs that benefit society or, in the final analysis, their holders. A recent academic argument advances ...

The controversy over President Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports of steel (25%) and aluminum (10%t) is less about economics than ego — Trump’s ego. Frustrated by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the reported chaos in the White House, the president, it seems, had to show who’s boss and who’s driving events. Hence, his broadside attack against many traditional US ...