Opinion

Steel tariffs work! That is, when President George W. Bush levied tariffs of 8 percent to 30 percent on steel imports in March 2002, it did seem to have a detectable positive impact on steel industry employment. For about a year after the tariff was imposed, steel industry employment stopped falling. Yay! Then the decline resumed amid a brewing global ...

Smug in the belief that their own payment apps would be enough to take on the threat from mobile, India’s banks underestimated the risk to their lucrative cards business. A recent Bernstein survey has some sobering news for them: They may have already lost Bollywood, and they can’t hope to win the neighbourhood grocer. Almost 30 percent of tickets in ...

Fintech startups have long had trouble turning feel-good rhetoric into profitable growth. Competition is intense, consumers tend to want things for free, and dinosaur banks are far from extinct. To make matters worse, finance just isn’t as addictive as messaging or catching up with friends. That counts in an era where billions are made through monetizing attention. Enter, Bitcoin. Back ...

UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s long-awaited speech on Brexit last week was admirably frank, impressively argued — and about 18 months too late. As it is, the country’s choices remain now just as they were before her address to the nation: Britain either stops this process in its tracks, or must prepare itself for dire consequences. May was right to ...

Russia and Ukraine may be practically at war with each other, but they are joined at the hip by Ukraine’s gas transit system, business partners in one of the world’s biggest energy export channels. On February 28, the company that owns the Ukrainian system, Naftogaz Ukrainy, won a $2.56 billion verdict that ends a four-year arbitration fight in Stockholm. The ...

Historical data show that stocks tend to post strong performances during periods of rising interest rates but only below-average results when inflation is rising or above average. This counterintuitive dynamic was explained by Warren Buffett in 1977 in “Why Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor,” which he wrote as the US was experiencing some of the worst price increases in its ...

During the dot-com-crazed 1990s, Cisco Systems Inc. became the world’s most valuable company. Widely expected to become the first company to hit a trillion-dollar capitalization, it made it barely halfway there. When the technology sector peaked in March 2000, Cisco had a market capitalisation near $550 billion. From that peak, the entire technology sector imploded. Cisco fared even worse than ...

Can we run the economy ‘hot’? To those who think that President Trump’s economic policy is simply an extended programme to make the rich richer, there is another, more subtle possibility. The focus on the rich, while understandable, simplifies and misrepresents Trump’s larger ambition. This is to create an economy that is operating at the outer edges of its productive ...

Macy’s Inc.’s latest earnings report was a message for doubters: Don’t count us out just yet. The department-store giant said comparable sales in the fourth quarter increased 1.3 percent over a year earlier, an upbeat result for a company that hadn’t recorded growth on this measure since the final quarter of 2014. And the retailer suggested it expects to keep ...

This week’s annual Mobile World Congress comes at a turning point for the industry: 2017 was the first year in four that mobile phone sales fell. The action on the convention hall floor, combined with some nearly buried findings in one operator’s annual results, may signal the next big thing in mobile growth. The smartphone age is certainly not over, ...