Opinion

So China would like a bit of foreign expertise after all. In a surprise move, and timed with US President Donald Trump’s state visit, China said it would scrap foreign ownership limits for banks and asset management firms. Asia’s biggest economy has been talking about opening its banking industry for a while now. Foreigners are already movers and shakers in ...

How should we think about new and future technologies? The two main stances seem to be extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. A better approach would be careful planning and management. Optimists like to point out that technology has been the greatest force for human welfare in the history of the species. They’re right. Before the Industrial Revolution, societies like the ...

What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ourselves into believing that corporate welfare can be seemly. Consider the caper, both amusing and depressing, that began when mighty Boeing sought protection behind the skirts of the US Department of Commerce. Boeing, America’s 39th largest corporation by market capitalisation (over $150 billion) and 24th by revenues ($94.6 ...

Chinese investors are piling into Hong Kong stocks again, but they’re being choosy, treating two peas from the same pod in different ways. Mainland investors have snapped up some $2.5 billion of shares in Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. over the past two weeks, Shanghai-Hong Kong connect data show, helping to push the lender’s stock in the city ...

Soon after Equifax Inc. disclosed in early September that a data breach had exposed the private financial information of 145 million Americans, some advocated that the credit-reporting agency be shut down. At the very least, many thought, it would suffer some financial repercussions. Instead, Equifax reported its second-best quarter ever based on sales and its preferred measure of profits. In ...

In a surprise announcement, the Chinese Ministry of Finance declared that it will henceforth allow foreigners to own Chinese banks outright and gain majority stakes in insurance and securities firms. While dramatic, this isn’t China’s first effort to open up its economy to outside expertise and competition. If they want this one to succeed, officials will need to do more ...

The headline number is impressive: A quarter-trillion dollars worth of deals from China that President Donald Trump can use to show he’s creating opportunities for US businesses and jobs for his base. The reality, however, is that the roughly 15 agreements unveiled on Thursday are mostly non-binding memorandums of understanding and could take years to materialize—if they do at all. ...

What does the fox say? I’m still not sure. But I do know what Fox sees: a lot of money hiding, to the tune of $25 billion. Earlier this week came shocking news that the Murdoch media magnates had discussed selling a majority of 21st Century Fox Inc.’s assets to Walt Disney Co. — yes, to the owner of ABC ...

The big problem with artificial intelligence right now isn’t that it’s taking over; it’s that it’s being entrusted with serious tasks with real-world consequences before it works properly. It’s the equivalent of letting self-driving cars operate in a city without lane markings. A viral post published on Medium by artist James Bridle is the latest case in point. Bridle took ...

“Do we have any historical evidence that lowering tax rates, particularly among the richest strata, generates economic growth, as the Republicans always predict? Has this ever worked?” —A reader The answer is ‘no.’ As Congress tackles “tax reform,” we really don’t have conclusive historical evidence of the relationship between tax rates and economic growth. To be sure, studies abound, but ...