Opinion

A week ago, SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son was talking about walking away from his planned Uber investment. Son said he may instead invest in Uber Technologies Inc.’s biggest rival, Lyft Inc. If both stocks were publicly traded, one could imagine Uber plummeting, and Lyft rising. Most people saw those comments for what they were: a negotiating ploy by Son ...

“Know thyself,” goes the Delphic maxim. You might think it superfluous advice for the world’s biggest banks — that the executives responsible for global finance would insist on a complete picture of the risks they’re running. Yet the crash almost a decade ago showed they didn’t know enough. And even now, their investment in self-awareness falls short. When financial markets ...

As President Trump prepared to wrap up his 12-day trip to Asia on November 13, ears in local capitals have picked up a subtle but unmistakable change in messaging from the US administration. The shift focuses on an apparently innocuous term: ‘the Indo-Pacific.’ US national security adviser H.R. McMaster introduced the president’s itinerary to reporters as “a great opportunity to ...

US President Donald Trump last week joined a long line of Western leaders straining to break open China’s markets for foreign companies. He’ll quickly discover that projecting Western hopes and ideals rarely works. No matter how beautiful the chocolate cake. What can work, however, is recognizing when China could use a foreign partner to help it achieve something Beijing wants, ...

Are cryptocurrencies an asset class? That depends on you. When you choose an investment portfolio, do you want to start with a category for these new currencies along with stocks, bonds and money market instruments? This is not related to the question of whether or how much you should invest. You can call cryptocurrencies an asset class and assign zero ...

If you want to understand why the tax code is so hard to overhaul, consider the case of the mortgage interest deduction. The issue is so sensitive that the House and Senate are dealing with it in completely opposite ways. To its many defenders and beneficiaries, the mortgage interest deduction symbolizes and subsidizes the American Dream. It promotes homeownership, which ...

On the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s election win, markets in Asia are behaving like the US president’s rhetoric is just background noise. At first, there were knee-jerk reactions. Japan’s Topix Index slumped 4.6 percent on Nov. 9 as investors digested the news while credit-default swaps protecting Indonesian government debt against default rose 26 basis points that week, the most ...

If soon-to-be CEO Michelle Gass needed any reminder of what a tough job she is stepping into at Kohl’s Corp., the department-store chain’s latest earnings report surely provided one. Kohl’s said its same-store sales rose a meager 0.1 percent compared to a year earlier. The company said its traffic trends continued to improve — but just because footfall is better ...

Ever since the financial crisis we’ve become accustomed to the idea that whatever governments fail to do, central banks can always come to the rescue. If you need a reminder of why this statement is wrong, look no further than the Bank of England (BOE). Much like other monetary authorities in the rich world, the BOE has been the main ...

Almost exactly one year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on national television to announce that, in a few hours, existing Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes would no longer be legal tender. This came as a complete shock to most; the weeks and months that followed featured long queues at bank tellers as hapless Indians tried to exchange old notes for ...