Opinion

Chemicals, equipment, machinery parts. It’s not sexy stuff. Certainly not as cool as games consoles, image sensors and flash memory chips. But who needs sexy when you can have excellent returns on your portfolio of tech stocks. That’s what JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Japan Technology Fund did. It went for the mundane and posted a 107 percent return in the ...

Seven years ago, the US led an effort to address a problem facing governments everywhere. Each year, people manage to avoid paying an estimated $2.5 trillion in income tax — a giant sum that could be used to combat poverty, update infrastructure or lower tax rates for law-abiding citizens. Now, however, the US is becoming one of the world’s best ...

Monopoly power is a hot topic of economic debate. Economists are starting to ask whether increasing industrial concentration is choking off productivity growth, reducing capital investment, throttling or deterring would-be entrepreneurs, raising consumer prices, and reducing the share of national income flowing to workers. This is a good and important effort. But it’s also possible that with all the attention ...

Yields on 10-year US government bonds have risen 40 basis points since September, about as much as German 10-year Bunds yield in total. The more than 200 basis point difference between the two debt market bellwethers is increasingly difficult to justify. It’s the lack of yield in Europe that looks out of whack. Just like the US, growth is picking ...

Preaching morality while practicing cupidity can be tricky, but various American governments have done it for years regarding smoking. This mental contortion now has a new chapter. The four largest American tobacco companies (Altria, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris) are, under government compulsion, funding newspaper and television ads to tell — actually, to remind — people that their products are ...

President Donald Trump invoked ‘America first’ by pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, promising to revive the coal industry and repeatedly tweeting himself as the author of the 105-month-old bull market. The nation’s top money manager of 2017 took the opposite path to becoming No. 1 and says it’s better to be lucky than smart. He embraced ...

Bitcoin has had a terrific year overall, thanks to a small but dedicated set of believers in the disruptive power of cryptocurrencies who have also enabled many other individual investors to participate in the eye-popping phenomenon. Yet after bitcoin’s value fell by more than a third in just a few days last week, and as exchanges struggle to cope with ...

Timing is everything. Hobbled by an aging population and negligible interest rates, Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. is keen for growth and sees overseas expansion, particularly in Southeast Asia and the US, as key. In its moves to acquire 73.8 percent of PT Bank Danamon Indonesia, it may just succeed where DBS Group Holdings Ltd. failed. Indonesia now is ...

The world’s central banks recently signed off on the Basel III rules for bank capital. The new system, years in the making, is a step forward: It will make banks stronger and safer. But there are several loose ends. One of the most important concerns the treatment of sovereign bonds on banks’ balance sheets. Banks that hold large, concentrated portfolios ...

With 2017 mostly said and done, it’s instructive to put the bond market in perspective so we know what to reasonably expect in 2018. Recall that at the start of the year there was no shortage of calls for the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note to soar to 3 percent — or even 4 percent — by ...