Opinion

Even by government standards, it is a colossally dumb idea: revoking someone’s license to work as a way to get them to pay off their student loans. Yet many states do just that. Student loan debt has more than doubled since 2009 to $1.3 trillion today. The average borrower in the class of 2016 left campus more than $30,000 in ...

Bad things don’t happen to good banks. Or that’s the carefully crafted image projected by the world’s priciest lender. Assiduously shielding its loan book from the flying debris of India’s $207 billion bad-debt crisis, HDFC Bank Ltd. has kept its balance sheet in a near-pristine condition. The aura of invincibility bestowed by a 1.26 percent soured-loan ratio — compared with ...

Questions, questions, questions. If there’s one thing that’s tailed China’s Xiaomi Corp. for the past six years, it’s questions. The most recent come as a pair: Will the company IPO next year, and will it fetch the $50 billion it’s supposedly seeking? Last weekend, tech industry newsletter The Information reported that the maker of smartphones and other devices is eyeing ...

Not much time passes these days between so-called major advancements in artificial intelligence. Yet researchers are not much closer than they were decades ago to the big goal: actually replicating human intelligence. That’s the most surprising revelation by a team of eminent scholars who just released the first in what is meant to be a series of annual reports on ...

What the Republicans are offering on taxes is a bad bargain for America’s future. They would borrow — roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade — to finance tax cuts that are pleasing for the present. Future Americans would pay the bill. There are at least three reasons why the Senate should reject its version of this self-serving deal. First, it’s ...

Infosys Ltd’s incoming CEO Salil Satish Parekh faces three choices: He can create a more valuable company, return cash to shareholders, or kick the can to a new set of owners. Unlike his predecessor, who got into a messy skirmish with the company’s still-powerful co-founders, Parekh will have some latitude to choose his strategy. For one thing, he has the ...

Akzo Nobel NV boss Thierry Vanlancker has the chance of a second stab at a jumbo chemicals deal with US peer Axalta Coating Systems Ltd. He should grab it. Axalta’s negotiating position has been weakened after it started talks with Japan’s Nippon Paint Holdings Co. Ltd. last month, having already entered into discussions with Akzo about a possible all-share merger. ...

Might this be China’s new Venezuela? Beijing’s frenzied drive to create a modern Silk Road puts Pakistan front and center, much as Venezuela was once a target of lending by China Development Bank as the nation sought to secure oil supplies. Of the $6 billion to $7 billion of current development projects in Pakistan as part of the China-Pakistan Economic ...

Almost daily, newspapers in the US, Europe and China release eye-catching headlines about China’s technological advances and economic prowess. The accomplishments are real. But they’re not necessarily evidence of Western failure or Chinese invincibility. In touting such achievements, commentators too often overlook the structural factors that have shaped them. Economists now recognize just how much of economic interaction is driven ...

“Why did the market go up today?” “There must have been more buyers than sellers.” That piece of circular logic is a sort of laconic joke among traders, equivalent to saying: “I have no idea.” Naturally, prices will only rise if the enthusiasm of buyers outweighs the fear of sellers. At the same time, it captures a worthwhile nugget of ...