Opinion

Uber Technologies Inc. flushed $4.5 billion down the drain last year as it spent heavily on expansion and battled the missteps of founder Travis Kalanick. Oddly, a British plumbing firm may give it a sense of whether it can plug some unwanted future outflows. Pimlico Plumbers Ltd., whose vans are ubiquitous in west London, is a fellow traveller of Uber ...

What’s long been one of the most attractive markets for insurers in Asia is turning ugly. Malaysia will require overseas insurance firms to jettison at least 30 percent of their domestic businesses via strategic stake sales or local initial public offerings by the end of June in order to comply with new foreign ownership rules. Companies from AIA Group Ltd. ...

Once upon a time, President Donald Trump vowed to “do a very major haircut” on the Dodd-Frank Act. After a lengthy review, his officials have apparently concluded that the 2010 law’s approach to the failures of large banks was about right. In some ways, this reversal is a pity. The 2008 crisis showed how dangerous it can be to let ...

Moviegoers have been going crazy over Black Panther, the new Marvel comic book superhero film. In addition to being a fun romp, the movie holds special emotional significance for many—not just because of its mostly black cast, but because of its setting, Wakanda. A fictional country located somewhere in Africa, Wakanda avoided colonization by foreign powers, and is now wealthy ...

Could the problem of global warming become so desperate that humans would be willing to take the vast risk of re-engineering our environment? It’s far from a desirable or lasting solution. Yet some scientists have thought deeply about it and concluded that’s what we’ll probably do. The human response to global warming has been so slow that it may be ...

If you lived in one of India’s largest cities, a startling sight would’ve greeted you when you picked up your morning newspaper last Monday: Whole front pages had been replaced by an artists’ impression of a skyscraper. There was to be a Trump tower in your town, the ads declared—something you might have already gleaned from the photograph of Donald ...

Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the European Commission’s ruling against Google last year, which included a 2.42 billion euro ($3 billion) fine, is that the remedial action Google was allowed to take didn’t make the market in question, shopping searches, any fairer or any more accessible to smaller players than it was before the ruling. Now there’s a reason ...

Look at two important numbers in Walmart Inc.’s earnings report on Tuesday, and you could draw different conclusions about the retailer’s momentum. Its closely watched US comparable sales rose 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier — strong growth after a third quarter that saw the best growth on this measure in eight years. That data point ...

Private-equity firms have many ways of making money, but PAG Holdings Ltd. may have found a unique model in its loan to HNA Group Co. The cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate has pledged most of its stake in a Hong Kong-listed unit in exchange for funds. The size of the advance wasn’t disclosed, but the 1.39 billion shares in Hong Kong International ...

President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to eviscerate the State Department’s budget may already be dead on arrival in Congress. It’s nonetheless a reminder of how the administration’s failure to take diplomacy seriously is undermining its own strategic goals. Barely two months after warning in its new National Security Strategy of ‘growing political, economic and military competitions,’ the White House delivered ...