Opinion

  Just days ahead of scheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Donald Trump said that US can act alone to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program if Beijing does not cooperate to put pressure on pariah nation. Trump and Xi are meeting on April 6-7 at Republican’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. North Korean threat and South ...

  Any horror aficionado knows that the only good zombie is a dead zombie. Don’t risk trying to bring one back to life. It’ll just come back to bite you. Apparently, policymakers haven’t watched enough B-movies. Worried about layoffs and soured loans, governments and banks across Asia continue to dole out cheap financing and other support to keep failing firms ...

  The $1.8 billion stake that Tencent Holdings Ltd. has bought in Tesla Inc. should give some confidence to other investors, despite the carmaker’s ugly balance sheet. But it’s far more important for Tesla’s future prospects than for its current needs: Without it, the company could end up a global afterthought in the race to build the next wave of ...

  The world’s biggest coal exporter has a problem. Demand for the dirtiest fuel is on the wane. The International Energy Agency — which has tended to overestimate coal production, and underestimate renewables — doesn’t expect consumption to regain its 2014 levels until 2021. Investment in new mines is ‘drying up,’ according to its latest market forecast. That’s reflected in ...

  It isn’t often that economics raises the most profound questions of human existence, but recent work of economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton (husband and wife, both of Princeton University) comes close. You may recall that a few years ago, Case and Deaton reported the startling finding that the death rates of non-Hispanic whites aged 50 to 54 had ...

  I’m taking you on a nostalgia trip. Remember the olden days (2016), when it seemed outlandish investments in technology startups were a thing of the faraway past (2015)? Snap out of it. Just look at the headlines of the past few weeks. China’s on-demand ride king Didi Chuxing is considering a $6 billion investment backed by SoftBank. Airbnb finalized ...

  Given the usual speed of economic reform in India, it’s remarkable that the biggest change in years might actually start on schedule. “Start,” though, is the operative word. If the country’s new national goods-and-services tax does go into effect in July, which looks more likely now that Parliament has passed the requisite legislation, that will be worth celebrating. The ...

  As the debate over Russian scandal rages, Trump aides are volunteering to testify to Congress without even being asked for. First it was ex-Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired in January for misleading the White House about his conversation with Russian envoy Sergei Kislyak, offered to testify if granted immunity. Flynn initially lied to Vice President ...

  With the bankruptcy this week of Westinghouse Electric Co., the future of big nuclear power plants in the US isn’t looking good at all. But maybe, just maybe, there is hope for something smaller. Westinghouse, which was acquired by Japan’s Toshiba Corp. in 2006, has been building the only nuclear power plants currently under construction in the US: two ...

  BlackRock shook the world of active management when it announced that it had fired five of its 53 stock pickers. BlackRock will also move $6 billion of the $201 billion invested in traditional active management to quant strategies. The announcement may not sound earth-shattering, but it augurs a larger trend: Traditional active management is dying, but perhaps not for ...