Opinion

  The news media have been abuzz for a few weeks about the proliferation and effect of fake news. Facebook Inc. is changing how it handles news from dubious sources, while Twitter Inc. is rethinking how to respond to bots promoting fabricated articles. Alphabet Inc. (Google) has rejiggered its algorithms to fight phony stories. All of which raises some very ...

  Hong Kong property investors thought they could pick up pennies in front of the steamroller called the Federal Reserve. No longer. US short-term rates were climbing hard even before Donald Trump’s victory. Interbank liquidity in the city was more than abundant, however, thanks to capital fleeing a weakening Chinese currency to the safety of the pegged Hong Kong dollar.All ...

  The unemployment rate is down to 4.6 percent, which sounds pretty good. But the unemployment rate doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for jobs, which is why the employment-to-population ratio, especially the ‘prime-age’ ratio for those 25 through 54, may be a better measure of the health of the labor market. After I wrote about this metric, several ...

  During his campaign and even since becoming president-elect, Donald Trump has said a lot of things and cited a lot of figures that appear to be completely made up. When he has talked about the economy, though, Trump has often relied on actual government statistics. For example, there was Trump’s charge that Barack Obama has been “the first president ...

  Here’s a maxim for life as a famous economist: If your theory wins a Nobel Prize, look out — it might already be running into big problems. When the Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing model won the prize in 1997, it had already required some major tweaks to fit new data; a decade later, it was being blamed for the financial crisis. ...

  A month after it ended, the 2016 US presidential election is only getting stranger. Intelligence agencies and private researchers now largely agree that Russia conducted a pervasive online campaign — through hacking, theft and propaganda — to disrupt the electoral process. The question is what to do about it. The first priority should be conducting a formal investigation. Yet ...

  Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s telephone call to US president-elect lasted only for 10 minutes. But it has upended the decades-old One China policy. And this was the closest a Taiwanese president came to getting a formal recognition by United States. Tsai telephone call stirred the hornets’ nest. And it led to a barrage of blunt criticism both from China ...

  Americans enjoy an unusual kind of security — their big, domestically focused economy isn’t very vulnerable to external shocks. But most people around the world don’t have that luxury: Their jobs, businesses and livelihoods are very sensitive to events in far-off lands, and the choices of leaders they don’t elect. Right now, much of the world is in danger ...

  Don’t tell Tiny Tim, but even if Brexit hasn’t put a damper on Christmas 2016, next year might be a different story. Come January, Britons will pay 5 percent more for their Lego sets, as the Danish company raises prices in response to the pound’s decline in the wake of the UK decision to leave the European Union. And ...

  Samuel Johnson got it wrong: Patriotism is the last refuge of the unprofitable. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Online Services Pvt. lost 23 billion rupees last year, and so its co-founder and executive chairman, Sachin Bansal, has suddenly morphed into a great champion of local companies. “We need to take a more India-centric approach” to regulation, he told a ...