Opinion

Don’t be too derisive of Eastman Kodak Co.’s yearning to reclaim its lost glory by jumping on the crypto bandwagon. If the dotcom bubble holds any lessons, the blockchain gravy train might have plenty to go around yet. Investors aren’t waiting to see if the proposed KodakCoin is just a fad, or the real new, new thing for a company ...

For much of the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has been thinking aloud about Facebook Inc.’s mission. He kept saying he wanted Facebook to become a place for meaningful social interaction. His resolution for 2018 was to ‘fix’ Facebook. It was a call to arms, but for what? It wasn’t clear how his musings might translate into substantive changes to ...

The record of economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, over the past half century has been discouraging. The two greatest blunders are well-known: policies that fed double-digit inflation in the 1970s, reaching a peak of 13.5 percent in 1980; and the more recent failure to prevent the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, sending unemployment to 10 percent. Unfortunately, ...

It’s been almost a month since Wall Street took a step towards adopting Bitcoin as its own with the launch of cash-settled futures contracts. The results haven’t been stellar. Promoted as ‘Gold 2.0,’ Bitcoin hasn’t quite worked out that way: Its price in dollars has fallen by about 20% from a mid-December high, while its volatility climbed to its highest ...

JPMorgan Chase & Co., it appears, is outgrowing its bank. The nation’s largest bank by assets reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results. It also crossed a big annual revenue milestone — re-entering the 12-figure club for the first time since 2010. It reported $104 billion for 2017 on an adjusted basis. However, at the same time that JPMorgan is more behemoth than ...

Good sense on energy hasn’t fled Washington entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has struck down the Trump administration’s bewildering proposal to subsidize coal-fired power for its “resilience” in the event of big storms or natural disasters. Making coal cheaper would have damaged health and cost lives by boosting air pollution, and made energy markets less efficient to boot. FERC ...

Two big shareholders of Apple Inc. are right to add their influential voices to those concerned with smartphone addiction. If they are serious about finding a solution, however, they’ll start looking elsewhere for progress on the issue. Like tobacco companies before them, tech companies are incapable of studying their products dispassionately and then regulating themselves for the common good. The ...

Waiting for another sign that Wells Fargo & Co. has turned a corner? Its fourth-quarter earnings provided differing levels of validation for investors who had sent the stock flying to a record earlier this week. For the first time since the GOP tax bill was passed last month, Wells Fargo detailed its impact. The bank essentially confirmed expectations that the ...

Frank Lloyd Wright purportedly said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Today, however, Oregon is the state with the strangest state of mind, which has something to do with it being impeccably progressive: In the series ‘Portlandia,’ the mention of artisanal lightbulbs might be satirical, but given today’s gas-pumping controversy, perhaps ...

The UK’s obvious turnabout on the desirability of a no-deal exit from the European Union shows how completely the tables have turned in the Brexit negotiations. With less than a year to seal a trade deal, the EU is nudging the UK towards an understanding that the only benign outcome is agreeing to a long transition period. That could allow ...