Opinion

  It’s a Christmas fairy tale. After a 30-year sleep, during which costs have run out of control, investment banks have suddenly woken up to the fact that thousands of their customers don’t make them money. Cursing the ogres of Basel, they find a magic marker pen and cross the freeloaders off their client lists. It all ends happily ever ...

  It’s not looking pretty for department stores. Other than electronics retailers and gas stations, department stores are the only major retail category in the US in which sales fell in the 11 months through November from a year earlier, according to US Census data released this week. And while most of the conversation about dying department stores centers on ...

  Economists like to tell a possibly apocryphal story about Milton Friedman. The prophet of free markets, visiting an Asian country in the 1960s, witnessed a public-works project that had people making a road with picks and shovels. When he asked why they didn’t use earth-moving machines instead, a local official responded that the goal was to provide people with ...

  Earlier this year, the Thai government announced its desire to create an economy of fresh new businesses through a 20 billion baht ($555 million) fund. Its stated goal was to “increase the number of startups in Thailand to 10,000 by 2018,” Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama Savanayana was cited as saying in April, according to the Bangkok Post. ...

  President-elect Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet, and he’s already delivered a helpful boost to the economy — the Japanese economy. At the end of a year of gloomy announcements, the Bank of Japan has raised its growth forecast for next year, and Trump deserves much of the credit. The main reason for the BOJ’s improving mood is ...

A truck attack in Christmas market in Berlin killed 12 people. And IS group, as it has become customary with the extremists, claimed responsibility for the rampage. The claim came shortly after German prosecutors released a Pakistani asylum seeker who was the sole suspect in the case because of lack of evidence. The German investigators are probing the case from ...

  WhiteOps, a US cybersecurity company, says it has uncovered the biggest online advertising scam ever, operated from Russia and making between $2.6 million and $5.2 million a day —as much as four times what the New York Times makes from advertising. The announcement should be a warning to anyone entrusted with a corporate budget to spend on online marketing: ...

  India’s ‘House of Debt’ is still swaying, though a little less dangerously than before. For the country’s highly leveraged companies, the year is closing on a somewhat more cheerful note than seemed possible six months ago. First, it was the billionaire Ruia brothers delivering the good news to Standard Chartered Plc and other creditors. As much as $5 billion ...

  What is Amazon.com Inc., exactly? If you answered “an online book retailer,” then you haven’t been paying attention for like, oh, the past decade or so. What seems like a straight-forward question is actually a much more complex and surprising inquiry than you might have guessed. I began thinking about this earlier this year, when we looked at whether ...

  Most presidents wait until inauguration before sparking their first foreign policy crises. Donald Trump has a month to go and he has already wandered into two — one with China and one with Russia. How will these foreign challenges shape Trump’s early months in office? His freewheeling style seems to have discombobulated China, which has some unexpected benefits. But ...