Opinion

President Donald Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico on Tuesday brought more disruption and controversy—to the markets and the island—than aid and comfort. Fortunately, there is a better model to provide for both the immediate humanitarian needs of these Americans and the long-term health of their economy. But it will take the kind of sustained bipartisan focus that yielded last year’s ...

Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is again picking low-hanging fruit by ordering Amazon to pay 250 million euros ($294 million) plus interest to Luxembourg, deemed to have rendered illegal state aid to the US company. But the European Commission should be aiming higher if they want to send a serious message to US tech giants about doing business ...

China’s bike rental companies Mobike and Ofo are in talks to merge, Bloomberg’s Lulu Chen reported. There’s not a sane mind in the world who doesn’t think that’s a good idea. One parallel is the merger of Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache to form Didi Chuxing, which then eventually folded in Uber China. They are, of course, extremely different businesses. ...

We have become so accustomed to bad economic news from Italy that few will have noticed how the euro zone’s third largest economy seems to be back on the march. That has helped some with job creation, but it also has significance for the future of the euro area: It’s undermining an article of faith among the euroskeptics, that the ...

Consider what is, for the moment, an entirely hypothetical question: What might Secretary of Defense James Mattis do if he received an order from President Trump to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea in retaliation, say, for a hydrogen-bomb test that had gone awry? Certainly, Mattis could try to talk the president out of the attack, if he thought ...

Australia’s record of 26 years without a recession flatters to deceive. The gaudy numbers mask serious flaws in the country’s economic model. First and most obviously, the Australian economy is still far too dependent on “houses and holes.” During part of the typical business cycle, national income and prosperity are driven by exports of commodities—primarily iron ore, liquefied natural gas ...

Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg marked the occasion with a remarkably contrite post to his followers: “For those I hurt this year, I ask forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I ...

Leaving aside the bloviating protests of President Donald Trump, there are two ways to understand Russia’s influence campaign against the 2016 election. The first is obvious. The Russians tried to elect Trump. You don’t need access to top-secret US government documents to reach this conclusion. It happened in real time. Russians hacked the emails of leading Democrats and distributed them ...

The secession of a region without constitutional authority is a big deal, as referendums in Catalonia and Kurdistan have shown in the last week. To get a sense of the possible consequences, think of the US Civil War, which started precisely because Southern states insisted they could secede while Northern states pointed out that such a right was nowhere in ...

Puerto Rico’s debt has been a major problem for years. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump supported a solution: We have to look at their whole debt structure…we’re going to have to wipe that out. You can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs, but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that. It only took ...