Opinion

Of all the follies of 2017, the most tawdry may be the GOP’s headlong rush to pass a tax bill that even its proponents don’t understand. What’s especially sad is that otherwise sensible Republicans seem to be capitulating to the tax-cut frenzy. Political desperation is the mother of this legislation. Despite Republican control of both houses of Congress, the Trump …

The seminal financial event of this year, the current decade, and possibly our generation is here: Futures trading in bitcoin has begun. But the derivative that would really damp the current crypto frenzy and make digital tokens a speculator-friendly—if not investment-worthy—commodity, currency, tulip, or whatever, isn’t futures. It’s options. It’s hard to see how even existing futures trading rules can …

The great clearance sale of Australia’s bancassurance industry is almost complete. With Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. offloading its life unit OnePath to Zurich Insurance Group AG for A$2.85 billion ($2.1 billion) on Tuesday, the country’s big banks have all but sold out of life insurance, an industry they dominated as recently as 2015. Only Westpac Banking Corp. …

Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane plight has drawn attention to the Jones Act, the 1920 law that compels all maritime commerce between US ports to be carried on ships built, owned and crewed by Americans. The law is adding to the island’s problems, and should be set aside for that reason alone — but the Jones Act was, or should have been, …

China is suffering from a frigid winter, but it can’t blame Mother Nature alone. Late last week, following a widespread uproar, officials reversed a policy banning some provinces from using coal for heat — which had the inadvertent but predictable effect of leaving large swathes of the country freezing cold. China’s government has been keen to reduce air-pollution levels, which …

Amazon.com Inc.’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market has inspired visions of a new breed of grocery juggernaut, trampling rivals still figuring out how to sell food online. At first glance, a recently released consumer survey by RBC Capital Markets offers some justification for those fears, showing Amazon already dominating online grocery shopping. And Amazon has only just begun …

Remember gold? It seems like only six years ago the shiny metal was flavor of the month, hitting a record $1,900 a troy ounce while its backers prophesied the end of the fiat money system. With bitcoin sucking up all the crazy in financial markets, gold looks to have lost its luster. The CBOE/Comex Gold Volatility Index, a rough proxy …

Bitcoin just passed its first major Wall Street test, but cryptocurrency bulls shouldn’t read too much into it. Bitcoin futures began trading on the evening of December 10, Sunday on the CBOE—the first ‘Wall Street’ exchange to list the digital currency — and the direction was straight up. By 11:30pm New York time, the contract had already been halted twice …

The UK has long prided itself on being open for business. Its top 100 publicly traded companies derive most of their revenue from overseas and boast a higher proportion of foreign bosses than the US, Germany and France. But that diversity is starting to fade — just as Brexit looms large. Recruitment firm Robert Half estimated earlier this year that …

Not tech, not interested.That seems to be the mantra of investors in Hong Kong as an instant-noodle spinoff fell as much as 12.4 percent in its debut on Monday and Hebei Construction Group Corp. was said to price its IPO at the bottom of the indicative range. The unit of Nissin Foods Co. is just one of a handful of …