Opinion

Remember the hype about the iPhone “super cycle?” Wall Street doesn’t. There was a popular investment theory that Apple’s 2018 would be something like a repeat of 2015, when the first larger-screen iPhone models flew off store shelves. Apple sold 231 million iPhones in its 2015 fiscal year, or 37 percent more than it did in the previous year. Apple ...

President Donald Trump has imposed 30 percent tariffs on solar panels made outside the US. It’s hard to tell why he’s doing this. It could be a protectionist move, or it could be designed to hurt renewable energy and protect the dying coal industry. But whatever the reason, the consequences probably won’t be severe. The solar revolution is happening so ...

Singapore is racing Hong Kong to the bottom in weakening shareholder rights. The city-state’s exchange said recently it will allow companies with dual-class share structures to list, a month after Hong Kong announced a similar proposal. The idea is to entice new-economy companies, but joining the dual-class-share club won’t improve the one thing Singapore needs more of: liquidity. In 1999, ...

General Electric’s multi-billion-dollar loss in a unit that sold long-term-care insurance is a blow from which the iconic company is still reeling. But it’s also a harbinger of a much greater challenge for society at large: paying to care for the growing number of Americans who can’t look after themselves. GE’s travails stem from the early 1990s, when insurance companies ...

Few topics are as discussed at Davos as ‘inequality.’ Business leaders and bankers take a great interest in debating how to ensure that globalization works for the many and not just for the few. This isn’t pure altruism, of course: They understand that a populist backlash could be devastating for their businesses too. These conversations too often fail to specify ...

If you want to gauge how Chinese consumers are reshaping the world, look at how many of them are leaving China. For vacation, that is. Outbound Chinese tourism has enjoyed explosive growth over the past decade and there’s plenty more where that came from: only 5 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens hold a passport, compared with 40 percent in ...

If humans want to avoid boiling the oceans, we’ll have to find ways to use energy more efficiently. This, in turn, requires solving a problem that people don’t typically connect to climate change: the turbulence created when we pump air, water, oil, gas and other substances through countless miles of ducts and pipes. Thanks to its confounding effects, fully 10 ...

Of all the regulatory threats to Facebook’s dodgy business model, Germany’s is the hardest to shake off. The German Federal Cartel Office has questioned the company’s use of third-party data to help target advertisements. Now that Chancellor Angela Merkel is likely to keep her job through 2021, Facebook faces ever-increasing pressure on this front. But no matter how unpleasant this ...

Last week, before news broke about the hacking of Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc., I conducted a little Twitter poll. The results were enlightening, and somewhat disheartening. At the end of last week, someone stole 523 million NEM coins, worth around $500 million, from Coincheck. It took about eight hours for the exchange to even notice that its wallet had ...

Brexit’s pending arrival has some companies pulling out. Hong Kong investors are going the other way. With the purchase of London’s iconic Cheesegrater building and the city’s Walkie Talkie skyscraper, investors from Hong Kong were the single biggest buyers of office property last year, accounting for 44 percent of total funds spent. It’s not just the weaker pound, but also ...