Opinion

  Have money, can’t buy. That’s the dilemma facing China’s drugmakers as they look to acquire overseas assets to sate the country’s growing healthcare needs. Snapping up vitamin producers and the like hasn’t proved a problem, but snaring actual pharmaceuticals manufacturers is a different matter, and will be put to the test as Germany’s Stada Arzneimittel AG hits the brakes ...

  It says something about the state of European politics that the Dutch election results are widely seen as cause for celebration. Geert Wilders — a far-right populist who makes Donald Trump look like a cautious centrist — did worse than expected. But he was by no means crushed, and the anger Wilders and his ilk are channeling is still ...

  It was their first face-to-face meeting at the White House. And they were not goody-goody about each other. US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried utmost to sidestep the issues that could be a spoiler in their first public appearance. Their inability to shake hands in the Oval Office spoke volume about the meet. During presidential ...

  Michael Hasenstab, the star bond investor, says he’s betting against the euro as a “hedge against populism.” This, however, is a narrative that’s going out of fashion; it won’t define the euro’s performance this year. In the summer of 2014, Hasenstab defended his Templeton Global Bond Fund’s investment in Ukrainian bonds by saying, “What we liked was that everyone ...

  Another storied occupation is on its way out and the replacement is neither robots nor foreign workers. We’re witnessing the death of the shoe salesman. Macy’s recently said it would convert more shoe departments to an “open sell” format, where customers serve themselves from stacks of boxes. J.C. Penney is experimenting with the format. It’s the way sales have ...

  Have you ever been to a bazaar, where a hawker offers something at a special price, “just for you?” The world of online retail is getting ready to take the practice to a whole new level — and it doesn’t take much speculation to see how things could go terribly wrong. Let’s start offline. There are tons of rules ...

  WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange’s revelation last week of the CIA’s arsenal of hacking tools had a misplaced tone of surprise, a bit like Claude Raines’ famous line in “Casablanca”: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” The hacking community, of which WikiLeaks and the CIA’s cyberwarriors are both aggressive offshoots, has been invading and ...

  Indian mining billionaire Anil Agarwal wins a gold star for boldness. His timing? “Could do better.” During the depths of the mining industry’s debt panic in January 2016, a 2 billion pound ($2.5 billion) investment in London-listed Anglo American Plc would have secured him more than two-thirds of the stock. Today, after a commodity price rebound and Anglo’s deleveraging ...

  When President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that his predecessor had tapped his phones, he created something of a metaphysical crisis. No one — not the Justice Department, not Congress and least of all the president himself — seemed able to ascertain the truth about the accusation. Now that they’ve had some time to look into it, what do ...

  The American diplomatic dichotomy couldn’t have been starker as far as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s approach towards North Korea is concerned. On the one hand Tillerson said North Korea has nothing to fear from the US or its allies. On the other hand, he suggested that US military action against North Korea was an option. Tillerson is on ...