Opinion

If you’ve ever been to India, it’s likely that you’ve been startled by how young the country looks; the streets of any Indian town, even of its villages, are full of 20-somethings. This isn’t a surprise: India is a very young country. Half of its population is under the age of 25. Two-thirds are less than 35. As a recent ...

Hedge funds are dead. Long live private assets. Remember when hedge funds were the envy of investors? The returns were magical. The managers were gods. And they bestowed their bounty on a select smart-money set. Investors happily paid absurd fees for the privilege, typically a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of profits. Some investors paid an additional “2 ...

In a recent talk about his new book, “Scale,” physicist Geoffrey West described climate change as a form of entropy –- disorder that’s created as the price of all the order and creative energy pent up in cities. In this view, climate change is not, as some argue, just a euphemism for global warming. It’s a broader term that reflects ...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has often been the silent man in the Trump foreign policy team. But out of the spotlight, he appears to be crafting a broad strategy aimed at working with China to resolve the North Korea crisis and with Russia to stabilize Syria and Ukraine. The Tillerson approach focuses on personal diplomacy, in direct contacts with ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has spent much of this decade convincing markets that the euro is irreversible. It is therefore mildly ironic that policy makers in Frankfurt may be in trouble because of the sudden return of confidence in the single currency. Investors flocking to the euro have pushed it above $1.20, a 14 percent appreciation since the start ...

Congress returns to Washington this week to a meat grinder: In short order, members must raise the debt ceiling, pass a budget (to avoid a government shutdown) and deliver emergency relief to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. So it might seem unrealistic to suggest that they strike a bipartisan deal on child-care tax credits. Yet this is precisely the kind ...

Since December 2015, China’s government has been talking up what it calls supply-side reform. State media says the goal is “stimulating business through tax cuts, entrepreneurship and innovation while phasing out excess capacity.” That sounds reasonable. In reality, though, supply-side reform is doing almost nothing to reduce capacity, and may well be worsening the inefficiencies that are holding back China’s ...

The sheer nastiness of Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton TV debates and the deft verbal fencing of French presidential candidates are still fresh in watchers’ memory. No wonder many were disappointed by Sunday’s ‘TV duel’ between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz, which Merkel won, according to polls. To many, the tame debate looked more like a ...

Nothing makes a tech company quake in its boots so much as the sight of Apple Inc. marching into its territory. It’s a big deal for Western Digital Corp. not only to have Apple throw its hat in the ring of the Toshiba Corp. chip fight, but to have that name brandished like a weapon. Foxconn Technology Group, long a ...

When you ask someone in the financial industry how his job creates value, he’ll often answer that it enhances liquidity. Why are high-frequency trading and other forms of algorithmic trading good for markets? Liquidity, we’re told. What’s the potential harm from the Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from engaging in proprietary trading? It could decrease liquidity. There are endless academic ...