Opinion

Stop wondering why China is muddying already squishy global markets by driving the yuan lower, and right before next week’s Lunar New Year holiday. Although US President Donald Trump’s use of a rarely employed trade-protection measure against washing machines and solar panels is indeed a provocation, Washington think-tank folks can take a break: the People’s Republic has no intention of ...

The future of trucking may tell us a lot about the future of work. It’s no secret that many Americans fear losing their jobs to automation. In a Pew Research Center poll last October, nearly three-quarters of respondents worried that “computers and robots could do most of the work currently done by humans.” And yet the job market seems to ...

Until recently, President Donald Trump had wanted a weaker dollar because he romanticizes manufacturing. A weaker currency has been a temptation for world leaders since the early days of industrialization, as it’s generally believed it will provide a boost to exports and stimulate the economy in the short run. We all remember the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that led to competitive devaluations, ...

Flipkart’s bringing in the big guns. India’s leading e-commerce company looks set to team up with Walmart Inc., garnering the startup a valuation of as much as $20 billion in return for a stake that could be as large as 20%, Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai reported recently. There’s a lot that Flipkart Online Services Pvt could do with around $4 billion ...

No doubt about it — The Bank of England is hawkish, and it is ready to embark on a rate-hiking cycle. Sterling took an instant leap higher to the dollar, and 10-year gilt yields rose to the highest levels seen since April 2016. Governor Mark Carney and the rest of the Monetary Policy Committee are leaving a lot to chance ...

‘It seems surreal to me,’ said Elon Musk, proprietor of SpaceX, and for once he was understating things. On Fenruary 6, his company blasted a 230-foot rocket into orbit, returned its two side boosters to Earth for a flawlessly synchronized landing, and — with exquisite nerd flair — propelled Musk’s own Tesla Roadster toward deep space, where it’s expected to ...

When British voters decided in June 2016 to exit the European Union, investors who had anticipated the opposite result stampeded out of sterling and the currency plummeted a record 8.05 percent to a 31-year low. Almost 20 months later, the pound has mostly recovered, providing some satisfaction to commentators who’d predicted that Brexit would prove more distressing to the EU. ...

Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market’s rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines—and blame them, too. Last year, Marko Kolanovic, global head of quantitative and derivative research at JPMorgan, estimated that ...

Biotech is bursting back to life in the US, and the enthusiasm is being felt across the Pacific. The crown jewel of the rally in Asia is South Korea’s Celltrion Inc., whose shares have soared 43 percent in the first month of 2018. While the surge has been driven partly by the stock’s impending upgrade from the small-and-mid-cap Kosdaq index ...

Well, we just kicked the can down the road again — to quote former President Barack Obama, who developed into an expert can-kicker during his eight years in the White House. The bipartisan budget agreement reached last week by Congressional leaders is nothing if not a huge evasion of responsibility. Neither party will make the unpopular choices necessary to pay ...