Opinion

Two days before the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people on February 14, Remington Outdoor Co. announced that it was filing for bankruptcy protection. Remington Outdoor is the world’s biggest gun company. In addition to Remington rifles, its brands include Bushmaster, Marlin and DPMS. It is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, which ...

It looks like one of the world’s best central bankers will get another term. Reports indicate that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will nominate Haruhiko Kuroda for another term as head of the Bank of Japan. The decision to stay the course is just one more sign that things are going right in the Land of the Rising Sun. It’s ...

This month, 6.5 million Chinese will travel abroad for the Lunar New Year holiday. They’ll bring luggage, smartphones and a desire to use the same technological conveniences they’ve grown accustomed to at home. For China’s tech companies, that’s a potent combination — one that may help them finally compete in overseas markets. Just as foreign companies often fail in China, ...

It’s hard to find anyone optimistic about the future of conventional retail as internet giants like Amazon continue to accumulate customers. But where’s the bottom? There is a helpful parallel — just not an obvious one — that might shed some light on the question. The best way to measure retail’s role in the economy while simultaneously accounting for population ...

“MASON CITY. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.“ —Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946) Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, ...

The best start to a year since 2014 in Singapore’s property market seems to have finally lifted the spirits of investors in its banks. A 37% jump in new home sales in January ought to be making lenders optimistic about what the Year of the Dog holds for their all-important mortgage businesses. Yet when the property data were released Wednesday, ...

More than 40 years ago, Congress adopted the Community Reinvestment Act to ensure that banks would serve everyone in the areas where they do business, regardless of race or class. Now, the Trump administration is considering how it might reform this long-controversial law. There’s reason for concern about the administration’s intentions. Done right, though, an update could actually be a ...

After enduring something of a sudden trauma last week, many market participants now wish for a rapid return to calm. That’s understandable, but it may not be in their longer-term interest to simply revert to the highly unusual market conditions that prevailed before. Instead, they should hope for a new, less abnormal market paradigm with respect to asset-price volatility, correlations ...

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Boris Johnson traded barbs this week over how far the EU intends to push its integration agenda. In a speech on Wednesday, the UK foreign secretary accused the EU of seeking to create an “overarching European state.” Not true, Juncker responded: “I am strictly against a European superstate. We are not the United States ...

Amazon Go, the global retailer’s experimental cashier-free convenience store, opened last week to enormous fanfare. At its heart was a promise to eliminate everyone’s least-favourite part of the shopping experience: checking out. With ceiling-mounted sensors and cameras backed by what one presumes is impressive artificial intelligence, Amazon is able to track every interaction a customer has with a product. It ...