Opinion

More than three months after its federal election, Germany still has no new government. Oddly enough, this may be less of a problem for Germany, which continues to enjoy a strong economic run, than it is for the European Union. The euro zone needs reform, and that won’t happen without German leadership. Angela Merkel promised in a speech on New ...

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner challenging tech giants on several fronts, has opened another: “big data.” In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she singles out data as an important competitive advantage that should be more seriously considered in antitrust reviews and investigations. Buying the mostly groundless big data hype is, unfortunately, often the flip side of ...

To understand why China is cracking down on power use by bitcoin miners, have a look at curtailment. The practice—where producers of wind and solar power cease generation because the entire electricity system is oversupplied—has been a major problem for the country in recent years. In the northwestern provinces of Xinjiang and Gansu, as much as one-third of wind generation ...

Demand is surging again for oil, minerals and grains — the basic goods to which Latin America’s fortunes have long been tethered. After a year of graft scandals and political whiplash, you can just about hear the sighs of collective relief. Or is that just a giant sucking sound? Since the voyages of discovery, raw materials and farm goods have ...

Today’s political discord is less durable and dangerous than a consensus, one that unites the political class more than ideology divides it. The consensus is that, year in and year out, in good times and bad, Americans should be given substantially more government goods and services than they should be asked to pay for. Lamentations about the paucity of bipartisanship ...

I guess a handshake with POTUS-to-be wasn’t a help after all. A year after Chinese billionaire Jack Ma met US President-elect Donald Trump, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has finally given up on his bid to buy MoneyGram International Inc. for $18 per share. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US dragged its feet on giving the ...

Five years after two high-speed trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, China’s railway companies are making a comeback. It’s not easy to find value after a 51 percent rally in the MSCI China Index during 2017. So lately, sell-side banks have been telling their clients a rail renaissance story. CRRC Corp., the world’s largest maker of equipment for ...

For the social-media business, this New Year is one of grim tidings. Every day, it seems, pioneers in the field are offering mea culpas — airing regrets, expressing caution, apologizing for a technology that seems to have run amok. One former Facebook Inc. executive recently conceded that the network is “ripping apart the social fabric.” A former engineer has warned ...

There is now a doctrine of what I call “solar triumphalism”: the price of panels has been falling exponentially, the technology makes good practical sense, and only a few further nudges are needed for solar to become a major energy source. Unfortunately, this view seems to be wrong. Solar energy could be a boon to mankind and the environment, but ...

Santa Claus has left us long time back with a sleigh load of sweaters, toys and electronics — some of which we didn’t ask for, don’t want or can’t use. And so now, as legions of people say “no thanks” to some of the gifts they unwrapped on Christmas morning, about $90 billion of those holiday goodies are going back ...