Opinion

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise is forcing analysts to look for a method to estimate a fundamental value for cryptocurrencies. So far, there is no agreement on a global standard, but bitcoins are unlikely to lose their leading role anytime soon. However there is plenty of room for downside if crypto-technologies do not deliver anticipated economic value, or if that value is ...

You may remember, early this year, a spate of gloomy reportage about the coming collapse of retail jobs due to automation and online shopping. This wasn’t just a dystopian forecast: Employment in the retail sector fell for seven straight months starting in January. A streak like that hadn’t happened outside of a recession since the early days of World War ...

There’s a lot of discussion these days about the US bond market’s yield curve, or more specifically how it has shrunk to the narrowest levels since 2007 — a movement that has historically presaged an economic slowdown. What hasn’t been talked about as much is how Europe’s yield curve has failed to follow the same path. And while there are ...

A year ago, I argued that lots of people don’t just want material goods — they crave the dignity that comes from working for a living. Even jobs that economists might deride as make-work can yield meaning, self-respect and social status. For this reason, I suggested that the government should establish a program to give work to everyone who wants ...

In 2009, the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen rolled out its first electric city bus. As of May of this year, it had 14,500 of them on the road — and by the end of this month, the city plans to have an all-electric fleet. Shenzhen’s efforts are another example of how China is leading the way in transforming urban ...

After UK and EU negotiators reached a deal opening a path for trade negotiations, arch-Brexiter Michael Gove declared British Prime Minister Theresa May had ‘won.’ That is a statement worthy of all the now-debunked Brexit slogans. The parties’ agreement shows the EU has given up virtually no ground, and that’s what’s likely to happen in the trade talks, too. In ...

A year ago, with the election of a US president who had fulminated against the international trade and financial systems, some analysts worried that the engine of global prosperity might soon be sputtering. But that’s not what happened. The global economy has surged forward this year, significantly outperforming expectations. As the International Monetary Fund wrote in its latest world economic ...

Masayoshi Son to the rescue. It helps to have the SoftBank Group Corp. founder on your side when Chinese regulators are raining on your IPO party. Lufax, the online wealth manager that’s among the world’s biggest start-ups, has hired five banks to work on a Hong Kong initial public offering of as much as $5 billion, according to IFR. SoftBank’s ...

Amid resurgent nationalism and talk of nuclear war, it’s been a rough year for global diplomacy. So a 10-party agreement to protect the waters of the planet’s far north qualifies as a minor miracle. For the next 16 years, commercial fishing will be prohibited in the central Arctic, a Mediterranean-sized patch of icy ocean more than 200 nautical miles from ...

Punters who wanted to bet against Britain in the run-up to the Brexit vote thought they’d found the perfect target in Berkeley Group Holdings Plc, a London-focused homebuilder partly reliant on inflows of foreign capital to purchase it’s very expensive homes. Throw in a government decision to increase property transaction taxes and penalize purchases of buy-to-let homes, and you had ...