Opinion

We are a nation of immigrants who are uneasy about immigration. There is a long history of resentment against immigrants, dating to the Irish immigrants in the 1840s and the Chinese a few decades later. This contrasts with our demonstrated ability to absorb newcomers. It’s time to overcome this two-headed legacy with an immigration policy for the 21st century. What ...

Just as foreign stock investors in India try to come to terms with a rudely reimposed 10% tax on long-term capital gains, a bigger shock awaits them. The grandfathering of past returns promised by Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech last week is missing from the fine print of the bill. Well, it’s not completely missing. The ...

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase say they’re putting their heads together to make health care better and less expensive for their employees. Just possibly, it’s a partnership that could disrupt the US health-care system — in a good way. The market value of insurance companies and pharmacy-benefit managers dropped on the announcement, a sign that investors think the alliance ...

It’s almost as though there’s too much good news in Japan. So much that some investors are starting to expect the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to lay groundwork for easing off its stimulus — and the central bank is falling over itself to convince them that policy is not going to change anytime soon. My, how things have changed! Instead ...

I hate to say I told you so, but … well, I told you so. Bitcoin, while still a popular financial asset, is looking less and less like a currency. Online payments company Stripe is ending Bitcoin support. It cites several reasons for doing so: “[Bitcoin] transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase ...

There’s an evolving mystery about Facebook: How are we supposed to measure its popularity now? On January 31, Facebook initially spooked investors by disclosing the slowest growth rate of daily users in its history and a 5 percent decline in the amount of time people spent on the social network in the final quarter of 2017. The company’s stock price ...

President Donald Trump talked a lot about coal mining during his campaign, and he has kept talking about it since. “We have ended the war on clean coal,” he declared in his State of the Union address just this week. I’d take issue with the phrase “clean coal” (more on that later), but it is definitely true that the Trump ...

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes was worried, but not about the unpleasantness that had begun the previous year and would linger long enough to become known as the Great Depression. What troubled the British economist was that humanity ‘is solving its economic problem.’ In his essay ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,’ Keynes, seeking to dispel pessimism, predicted that, ‘assuming no ...

Sending investors the bill for a shortfall from India’s new goods and services (GST) tax is a bad idea. Finance minister Arun Jaitley should resist the temptation. A long-term capital gains levy on equity can be problematic in a country perennially short of domestic savings. In a frothy stock market, it’s like crying “fire” in a crowded room. Profits from ...

As Janet Yellen’s tenure comes to an end, it’s worth reflecting on what may be her greatest accomplishment as chair of the Federal Reserve: With calm and dispassionate competence, she kept the central bank at arm’s length from a political system paralyzed by partisan strife. Look at the rest of Washington to see how valuable to the country that distance ...