Opinion

Facts are facts, but their interpretation is often subject to preconceived notions that can be easily misunderstood. Households have been net sellers of stocks for some time, which is a fact. The interpretation of this fact, however, can go badly awry. The dangerous implicit assumption is that households are selling because they want to reduce their exposure to equities. That ...

Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier deserves congratulations for resigning from a White House business council to protest President Donald Trump’s shameful response to last weekend’s white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. So do two other CEOs who followed his example. More corporate leaders should do the same. It’s in their interest to do so. Corporate leaders lend credibility to a ...

China is the largest market for General Motors, but there is no GM China. Instead, there is SAIC-GM, a joint venture between China’s largest state-owned auto company and GM.All auto companies operating in China have a similar partner, such as SAIC-Volkswagen, GAC-Toyota and Changan-Ford. And the partners are typically state-owned companies, and their names come first. Doing business in China ...

China’s budget and trade scolds should pause for reflection. Debt racked up by China’s government, companies and households will likely balloon to almost 300 percent of gross domestic product by early next decade, the International Monetary Fund projected in its annual review of the country’s economy. Big, for sure, and a risk to global financial stability. But anything less would ...

The rally this year in US stocks has been defined by its lack of breadth. Put another way, without the eye-popping returns of a few high-flying technology stocks, the performance of the market would look very different—and not in a good way. So it’s more than a bit concerning when the so-called smart money starts to pull away from this ...

The most depressing aspect of the current North Korean crisis is that even if Donald Trump wins, he loses. Despite doubling down on his rhetoric of “fire and fury” and deriding his predecessors for failed negotiations, Trump looks like he wants to eventually strike a deal with the nation’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un. Just look at what Secretary of State ...

Looking at the performance of China’s currency this year one would suspect that things are looking up in the local economy. The reality is that the yuan’s 4.5 percent gain against the dollar is as much a reflection of weakness in the US currency as it is about developments in China. At this point, what investors should expect for the ...

We’re having the wrong conversation about women in tech. We need to decouple two very different issues that have arisen amid the commotion about diversity at Google: biological differences between genders, and bias against females working in tech and more generally in well-paid, prestigious jobs. Let’s start with the biology. Studies on how babies or very young children interact with ...

As talks to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement start in Washington, it still isn’t clear whether President Donald Trump wants to dismantle the pact—”the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” he’s called it—or merely rebrand the same basic product under his own name. With any luck, it will be the latter. The administration’s negotiating goals, published last ...

aThe trade deficit is a lot smaller than it was a decade ago: Over the 12 months ending in June, according to data released last week by the Commerce Department, the US imported about $531 billion more in goods and services than it exported. In 2006, the deficit was $762 billion. Those numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation; if they were, ...