Opinion

This is the summer of our discontent. As Americans celebrate July 4, they are mad at their leaders, mad at their government and mad at each other. A recent Pew poll finds that ‘public trust in government remains near historic lows.’ Just 20 percent of Americans trust the government to ‘do the right thing just about always or most of …

Wall Street banks, struggling with years of declining revenue from Asia, will be hoping two market-opening measures by China at the weekend finally spell a return to boom times. They’re likely to be disappointed. HSBC Holdings Plc’s achievement in becoming the first foreign bank to control a mainland securities joint venture, coupled with the launch of China’s bond-connect program with …

Japanese investors had a torrid time in the lead up to the French elections, offloading about 3 trillion yen ($26.5 billion) of French government bonds. But with net buying of the overseas notes in seven of the past eight weeks, according to Japan Ministry of Finance data, could they be returning? The recent jump in 10-year European bond yields provides …

President Donald Trump has always had a weakness for simple and fantastical fixes. Illegal immigration? Build a wall. Jobs moving overseas? Tax imports. Unemployment in Appalachia? Dig more coal. Rising medical costs? Repeal Obamacare. Trump’s gift for simple slogans served him well as a candidate. As president, however, it is failing him and endangering the country. When the Supreme Court …

China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hong Kong coincided with the official start of the China Bond Connect program with Hong Kong that gives offshore investors another way to access the mainland’s $10 trillion debt market. Although the link between China’s mainland and offshore bond markets may look ceremonial, for the People’s Bank of China it could help set the …

Toshiba Corp. forgot to add its cardboard box of bits and bobs to the corporate garage sale. The flailing Japanese group is in the process of selling its prized chips business for $20 billion in badly needed funds, having already hived off a medical device unit and nuclear power. And it continues to consider selling or taking public the Swiss …

Thrill-seekers in Hong Kong who want to gamble in casinos usually have to take a bumpy, hour-long ferry ride to Macau. Those who crave excitement without leaving the city might do just as well punting on Hong Kong’s small-cap stocks. Structural weaknesses and a reluctance by regulators to delist miscreant companies has turned Hong Kong’s $4.6 trillion stock market into …

Let’s imagine a Chinese ‘applied history’ project, similar to the one at Harvard’s Belfer Center that helped spawn Professor Graham Allison’s widely discussed book ‘Destined for War.’ Allison’s historical analysis led him to posit a ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and a dominant America, like the ancient conflict between Athens and …

It could be a bond market correction, or the start of a rout, or the seeds of a full-blown tantrum. But it’s none of these. In Europe, it’s just overdone. The fixed-income selloff has missed the fact that nothing fundamental has happened on the economic data front, or even politically — we’ve just been talked at by central bankers getting …

Clean coal, always dubious as a concept and never proved as a reality, has now failed as business proposition. Southern Co. has decided to stop work on a process that would have captured carbon dioxide emissions from a coal plant in Mississippi. Giving up on the project, which was nearly $5 billion over budget and three years behind schedule, makes …