Opinion

Amazon.com Inc.’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market has inspired visions of a new breed of grocery juggernaut, trampling rivals still figuring out how to sell food online. At first glance, a recently released consumer survey by RBC Capital Markets offers some justification for those fears, showing Amazon already dominating online grocery shopping. And Amazon has only just begun ...

Remember gold? It seems like only six years ago the shiny metal was flavor of the month, hitting a record $1,900 a troy ounce while its backers prophesied the end of the fiat money system. With bitcoin sucking up all the crazy in financial markets, gold looks to have lost its luster. The CBOE/Comex Gold Volatility Index, a rough proxy ...

Bitcoin just passed its first major Wall Street test, but cryptocurrency bulls shouldn’t read too much into it. Bitcoin futures began trading on the evening of December 10, Sunday on the CBOE—the first ‘Wall Street’ exchange to list the digital currency — and the direction was straight up. By 11:30pm New York time, the contract had already been halted twice ...

The UK has long prided itself on being open for business. Its top 100 publicly traded companies derive most of their revenue from overseas and boast a higher proportion of foreign bosses than the US, Germany and France. But that diversity is starting to fade — just as Brexit looms large. Recruitment firm Robert Half estimated earlier this year that ...

Not tech, not interested.That seems to be the mantra of investors in Hong Kong as an instant-noodle spinoff fell as much as 12.4 percent in its debut on Monday and Hebei Construction Group Corp. was said to price its IPO at the bottom of the indicative range. The unit of Nissin Foods Co. is just one of a handful of ...

Drug prices are too high, and Congress lacks the political will to do anything about it. These are two of the most uncontroversial assertions in the contentious debate about US health care policy — and they explain why states should be allowed to act on their own. The high price of medicine is a familiar lament from presidents and pharmaceutical ...

In a recent Atlantic article, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan declares that college is, mostly, a waste of time. Caplan’s claim is sure to appeal to those who feel that their own higher education was wasted, or who dislike colleges because of liberal campus politics. But his arguments against college are deeply flawed, and the country would be well-advised ...

Miniatures of ComfortDelgro Corp. taxis are popular children’s toys in Singapore. Not for long, though. The ubiquitous blue and yellow Toyota Crown cabs are leaving the realm of kids’ imagination and heading for grownup nostalgia. One day soon, they’ll belong in a museum. The end is nigh for the conventional taxi business, though that’s not what Comfort said in a ...

Barring a collapse in the last few weeks of the year, US stocks will post their ninth consecutive calendar-year gain once you include dividends. The only other time the S&P 500 has advanced for nine straight years on the basis of total returns was in the 1990s, when stocks were positive every year from 1991 to 1999. The S&P 500 ...

No one can say we weren’t warned. For years, scholars of all shapes and sizes — demographers, economists, political scientists — have cautioned that the populations of most advanced countries are gradually getting older, with dramatic consequences for economics and politics. But we haven’t taken heed by preparing for an unavoidable future. The ‘we’ refers not just to the United ...