Opinion

It’s becoming all too easy to throw accusations at Chinese companies, especially when trade and political tensions rise. You know the refrain: They’re just copycats of US counterparts, ripping off larger rivals and protected by trade barriers such as censorship and investment laws. Frankly, this is an intellectual crutch. Witness the overuse of descriptive cliches — X, the Netflix of ...

Three down, one to go. Fire sales aren’t usually associated with handsome profits; lucky for HNA Group Co. that its asset hoard includes Hong Kong real estate. The indebted Chinese conglomerate has sold the third of four plots of land bought just over a year ago to local developer Wheelock & Co. for HK$6.36 billion ($811 million), the latest step ...

The most significant trade story of the year might be happening about 5,000 miles from Donald Trump. Trump is pressing ahead with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, widely seen as typical of America’s retreat from the global order the US had underwritten since 1945. Considering moves like tariffs and his threat to Nafta and Brexit, it can seem that ...

Hoping to jump-start its “Make in India” manufacturing push, India’s government has rolled out the welcome mat for foreign investors. It should consider doing the same for global bond buyers. Indian bonds are, at the moment, suffering a full-scale rout. On Monday, yields on benchmark 10-year government debt—called the “G-sec” rate in India—continued their slow creep upwards to 7.78%. Many ...

The private equity industry has had its struggles in achieving gender balance just like the rest of Wall Street. But it has the most incentive to do so. Private equity firms struck about $120 billion of buyout deals for US companies last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg based on pending and completed transactions. Leading the charge were takeovers ...

On the face of it, the idea that Google is discriminating against white men is laugh-out-loud funny. In 2016, according to the company’s most recent diversity report, Google was 69% male and 56% white. Some 53% of the engineering positions were held by white men. Leadership was 75% male and 68% white. Meanwhile 2% of Google employees were black, and ...

Is it too much to ask that the government not insult our intelligence while it is lightening our wallets? As an overture to his predictable announcement of steel and aluminum tariffs, the president, that human sponge ever eager to soak up information, held a “listening session,” at which he listened to executives of steel and aluminum companies urge him to ...

My father’s words still ring loud a couple of decades later. “No one wins a war.” We were talking about military conflicts, yet those same five words are just as true for a trade war. US President Donald Trump clearly has other ideas. “Easy to win,” he says! One has to wonder how the US will prevail in a trade ...

As if a brewing trade war wasn’t enough to worry about, investors also need to be alert to the threat of a major currency conflict. Norihiro Takahashi, president of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, dismissed Donald Trump’s tariffs plan as a “performance” for his supporters, and said US assets are no longer expensive, in an interview with The Wall Street ...

This past weekend was not only an important date for two large European countries, but also for markets. In Germany, the Social Democrat Party said its members decided to join a coalition government led by Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel, enabling Merkel to form a new pro-Europe government. In Italy, voters decided not to give any political party a majority ...