Opinion

  Expats living in the home of UBS Group AG, drug maker Novartis AG and commodity trader Glencore Plc earn an average salary of $188,275 a year. That’s the highest in the world and almost twice the global average, according to data published by HSBC Holdings Plc. Switzerland also tops the bank’s expat career ranking for a second year. “Expats ...

  A trip is often defined by its surprises, so here are my biggest revelations from six days in Lagos, Nigeria. Most of all, I found Lagos to be much safer than advertised. It is frequently described as one of the most dangerous cities on earth. Many people told me I was crazy to go there, and some Nigerian expats ...

Any summation of Barack Obama’s impact on domestic policy and politics should begin with this: In 2008, he assured supporters, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Soon he will be replaced by someone who says, “I alone can fix it.” So, Americans have paid Obama the compliment of choosing continuity, if ...

  Three months ago, Gadfly advised India’s state-run banks to stop lending because they didn’t have the capital to keep up appearances. That was before the surprise November 8 cash ban, which led to a deluge of low-cost deposits into the system. Add a government eager to dispel criticism that getting rid of 86 percent of the currency in circulation ...

  The high seas — all that deep water beyond 200 nautical miles from a coastline — are this planet’s last frontier. And like all previous frontiers, they’re ripe for plunder. But there may be a surprisingly simple solution to the scourge of overfishing on the high seas: a ban on commercial fishing in international waters. The proposition may sound ...

  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claimed in his New Year’s message that the development of banned intercontinental long-range missiles is in ‘final stages’. US president-elect tweeted the following day: it won’t happen. Kim also vowed to further enhance his country’s military capability unless the US ends war games with rival South Korea. Trump is confident that Pyongyang will ...

  This is the year that active-investment management makes its return to form. It is the year, or so we are told, when active fights back, scores some points, and gets its revenge on passive indexers. For the record, active management never went away. The claim that it has returned, after a run of fairly horrific performance, is likely little ...

  When the temperature drops to freezing in a country of almost 1.4 billion people, the power needed to keep the population warm soars. That’s one of the main reasons China’s northern cities have spent much of the past month choking on smoggy, toxic air. Particulate concentrations in areas north of Shanghai that once qualified for state heating subsidies and ...

  It’s hardly a happy new year for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Just before Christmas, the US Trade Representative added Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce site to a list of “notorious markets” that traffic in counterfeits. That’s an unseemly place for a publicly held company: Other members include a Chinese shopping mall that specializes in counterfeit leather goods and a Paraguayan border ...

  The data scientists writing the algorithms that drive giants like Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Facebook Inc. are today’s technology wizards, and companies and governments increasingly use their creations — often in secret and with little oversight — to do everything from hiring and firing employees to identifying likely suspects for police monitoring. But there’s a dark side — and ...