Opinion

Yang Yang, a 22-year-old Chinese corn farmer, spends two to three hours per day streaming video of life in his cliffside village to smartphones across China. He spends lots of time clinging to a cliffside ladder, one hand on his selfie stick, while he banters with fans about village life. It’s hardly riveting television, but in China it has an ...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 — commonly known as the Republican tax reform bill — has a number of good things in it. My Bloomberg View colleague Justin Fox has an excellent rundown. The corporate-tax rate cut was something that needed to happen for a long time, and mainly just follows the example set by other developed ...

One year ago, India’s bond market was riding a wave of unprecedented liquidity. Now it’s mired in all kinds of doubts, ending 2017 weaker than Chinese sovereign debt when the opposite outcome would have been more natural. After all, India saw a ratings upgrade by Moody’s Investors Service during the year, while China was downgraded. The message for Indian Prime ...

Shenzhen is the only downer this year among major Asian stock markets. The Shenzhen Composite Index, often referred to as China’s Nasdaq, fell about 4 percent in dollar terms, a sad result compared with the more than 35 percent gain in the Hang Seng Index. The Shanghai Stock Exchange SSE 50 A-Share Index, the so-called Beautiful 50 gauge of China’s ...

Europe’s regulators and financial institutions are under the gun: With a January 3 deadline, they’ve been scrambling to comply with new rules designed to make the region’s capital markets more investor-friendly. The goal — if not the way the policy is being implemented — is one their counterparts in the US might want to consider. Attention so far has focused ...

The number of Chinese registered as suffering from depression, anxiety, dementia, and other mental illnesses increased by 25 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to Chinese authorities. By one recent accounting, they number 173 million. Only 20 million receive professional treatment. Long-standing social stigmas and a lack of treatment options account for most of the gap. But those biases and ...

If financial market volatility was given up for dead in 2017, then get ready for a resurrection. To understand why, take a look at the incoming economic data. When the underlying dynamics of the economy change, the data tend to become more volatile before markets react. Economic volatility as expressed by the standard deviation of changes in the monthly data ...

Many of the assessments of the 2017 financial markets understandably focused on the impressively favourable outcomes delivered by stocks and other risk assets. Yet it is also worth considering what didn’t happen — in particular, nine events, which, by not taking place, contributed to make the last 12 months exceptional for many investors, big and small. Superlatives have been and ...

As the world ushered in 2018, it’s worth reviewing what we forecast for China in the previous year, and to cast ahead for what themes might play out over the next 12 months. After meeting of Communist Party leaders at the Central Economic Work Conference, we can expect their targets and objectives for 2018. And these meetings have great import: ...

The trade war didn’t happen. Prepare for a few skirmishes. It was high on many observers’ lists of things that could go badly wrong in 2017. Buying and selling of goods and services across borders not only increased this year, but also grew more than anticipated. Next year may test whether that’s a durable trend or just an accident that ...