Opinion

Infosys is trying too hard to flaunt its digital chops

Oh no, no, no. That old time fire is gone. It’s not so much things you say, love. It’s what you don’t say I’m afraid of —Neil Diamond (I Got the Feelin’) Infosys Ltd. struck a cheery note with its June quarterly results. But then, what option did it have? The management of the Indian software exporter is buffeted by ...

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Trump stalls an engine of new business

In President Donald Trump’s latest effort to wall the U.S. off from the rest of the world, his administration has ditched a plan to make it easier for successful foreign entrepreneurs to come and work in America. The decision may play well with the president’s nationalist base, but it will not help the U.S. economy. The administration has delayed (and ...

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States can keep rooftop solar market growing

Almost overnight, it seems, the decade-long expansion of rooftop solar in the US has come to an end. Installations are set to fall by 2 percent this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Partly to blame is a widening campaign to end a key customer incentive, homeowners’ ability to sell their extra energy back to the grid at retail ...

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Appraising Friedman, 50 years after presidential address

Paradigm shifts do not come often in economics. From Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, there is only a handful of scholars who can claim to have radically changed the way we think about how markets should work and what governments can do to improve their functioning. One such moment came almost 50 years ago when Milton Friedman delivered his ...

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Brexit pushes consumers to the point of no return

So much for Brexit triggering an immediate economic meltdown. While the pound has fallen 13 percent against the dollar since Britons voted to leave the European Union in June last year, the country’s economy has performed respectably, so far. A year later, however, signs the UK is approaching a tipping point are building. Britons are paring their spending on clothing, ...

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The robots are going to make the best fake news

Imagine that tomorrow, some smart kid invented a technology that let people or physical goods pass through walls, and posted instructions for how to build it cheaply from common household materials. How would the world change? Lots of industries would probably become more productive. Being able to walk through walls instead of being forced to use doors would make it ...

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UK’s Brexit chaos leaves EU friends, foes bemused

Theresa May’s goal at this point in the Brexit negotiations was to be a strong British prime minister —between European Union leaders. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Instead, as Brexit Secretary David Davis heads to Brussels for the second round of negotiations, EU officials and politicians are looking at a Britain where senior ministers openly disagree about their ...

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China’s anti-addiction drive ruins video games

Shareholders of Tencent Holdings Ltd., the world’s biggest video game company, panicked last week. People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, singled out ‘Honour of Kings,’ Tencent’s biggest game, for an unusually high-profile criticism. ‘Poison,’ the paper declared of a game played by roughly one in seven Chinese. “Constantly spreading ‘negative energy.’” It linked the game to ...

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For ECB, better to be flexible than sorry

I am giving you permission: You can safely ignore Amazon’s Prime Day, the annual fake shopping holiday Jeff Bezos invented two years ago.The European Central Bank is unnerving markets by remaining vague over the future of its bond-buying scheme. Yet, if investors listened carefully, they would detect an emerging framework for understanding what guides policy makers. The first principle is ...

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Would Congress act on its war responsibilities?

Predictably and sensibly, a three-judge panel of the nation’s second-most important court, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, recently dismissed, unanimously, a lawsuit brought by a Yemeni man, two of whose relatives were collateral fatalities in a 2012 US drone attack that killed three terrorists. The suit asked the court to declare the attacks illegal under several ...

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