Opinion

Largely lost in the debate over how much credit President Donald Trump should or should not get for the performance of US stocks this year is that perhaps the biggest reason for the rally is strong earnings. With more than 90 percent of the S&P 500 members having reported second-quarter results, earnings growth is tracking at a 12.2 percent pace ...

If you’ve never tried a Japanese snack called Jagariko, I highly recommend it. When I visited the Tokyo offices of Japanese snackmaker Calbee Inc., I made sure to ask if I could have a free pack of my favorite snack. “Maybe,” the managers hedged. I wasn’t at Calbee to talk about their potato sticks, but their corporate culture. Calbee is ...

As the world ponders the meaning of President Donald Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” on North Korea, it’s worth asking why his predecessors never took those steps to stop its nuclear program. When Bill Clinton was confronted with the threat of North Korea’s exit from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, he considered military force. But he ended up going for ...

President Donald Trump has thrown his support to the Cotton-Perdue bill to restrict legal immigration of low-skilled workers into the US by as much as 50 percent on the grounds it would raise the wages of American working families. That’s not what the economic evidence is showing, however. The only academically solid study of the impact of reducing legal immigration ...

Japan has served its time as a symbol of economic failure. Its latest growth surge puts it in a welcome new role. The country’s demographics, according to conventional wisdom, are supposed to be bad for the economy. Instead, Japan unexpectedly shot to the top of Group of Seven club, with its gross domestic product notching 4 percent annual growth last ...

President Donald Trump takes economic indicators seriously, except when he doesn’t. He’s boasted that recent stock market highs endorse his leadership; before the election, he said it was all a bubble. In the same way, before he took office, low unemployment was a phony number that meant nothing; now it’s a sure sign of success. In general, stock-market performance is ...

President Trump’s intensifying feud with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has led to speculation that this could be a prelude to a formal break with the Republican Party. I have no idea what’s going on in Trump’s mind. And it’s absolutely true that he’s constructed an inner circle in the White House that has very few connections to the Republican ...

Most experts debating bail-in and bail-out strategies agree that banks should build capital and shrink balance sheets as the best way to avoid a collapse and rebuild after one. But researchers are suggesting a more personalized version of that recipe that makes the difference between life and death for struggling firms. In a recent paper, Bank of Italy’s Emilia Bonaccorsi ...

In a recent episode of HBO’s sitcom “Silicon Valley,” a lawyer tries to extort money from a struggling startup by threatening to sue it for patent infringement. The troll, who understands nothing about the underlying technology, owns a patent so broad as to be unenforceable, but knows that the victims of his perfectly legal extortion scheme lack the financial resources ...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has defiance in his blood. It’s said his grandfather once asked what would happen if America defeated North Korea in war, to which his father answered: “If we lose, I will be sure to destroy the Earth. What good is the Earth without North Korea?” President Trump has decided to confront what’s probably the ...