Opinion

I vividly remember a time back in 2007 when some people I knew were marveling at an online ad for a house in Pittsburgh selling for $1. Of course, the true cost of houses being auctioned for almost nothing is much higher, since you have to rebuild and maintain them. But it just served to illustrate Pittsburgh’s battered reputation as ...

The fierce cable television pioneer John Malone recently compared Amazon.com Inc. to the Death Star. Companies whose share prices have been crushed by whispers of Amazon’s interest in their industry surely agree with Malone’s assessment. Executives hunting for allies to protect them from Amazon’s Empire have landed on Google and Microsoft Corp. Apparently the best way for a company to ...

Broadcom Ltd. needs to start talking about its plans for Qualcomm Inc.’s licensing business — sooner rather than later. Qualcomm said in a recent meeting with Broadcom hadn’t swayed it from a decision to reject the chipmaker’s latest takeover proposal of $82 a share, or $104 billion. This isn’t entirely surprising, as Qualcomm had previously said the proposal undervalued it, ...

In late 2016, the Air Force realized it was facing a shortage of about 700 fighter pilots. The service, to its credit, pushed ahead with several initiatives to avert the looming crisis. The result: The Air Force is now short about 1,200 fighter pilots. It’s not that the Air Force’s steps weren’t improvements. It’s that they were too small. With ...

With the unemployment rate down to near four percent, and new claims for unemployment insurance at a 48-year low, maybe the economy can’t accommodate more workers without zooming out of control. That’s the conventional wisdom, but a few economists are skeptical of this narrative. We see an economy that is still well below its long-term trend line. How do we ...

The European Union can act in unison at times — for example, on Russia sanctions or, at least so far, on Brexit. But as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel try for a closer union in the next few years, they will need to be mindful of the fact that there is no single narrative among the ...

As a new capital markets associate at Lehman Brothers in 2001, I was thrown into the summer program mating ritual known as rotations. That’s when you spend time working in various areas of an investment bank before being assigned to a department. The least popular assignment at the time was the government bond trading desk. Why? Because the US was ...

Anyone looking for good economic news will be disappointed by the latest inflation report, which showed the Consumer Price Index (CPI) advancing by 0.5 percent in January. By itself, this isn’t especially alarming — prices jump around month to month — but it has troubling implications for the future. To some economists, it suggests the possibility of another financial crisis ...

The Indian central bank is shutting down its halfway houses for debt addicts. In the process, it’s also throwing out an infuriating alphabet soup: CDR, SDR, S4A and their ilk. Lenders will now have a much cleaner—and stricter—system for dealing with distressed large borrowers. If they still try to hide bad loans, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will whack ...

Time and space are wonderful things — except South Africa doesn’t really have the luxury of either. The ruling African National Congress party are trying to smooth the end of President Jacob Zuma’s political career, and decided not to set a deadline for him to respond to their decision that he should leave office. An extended exit has the capacity ...