Opinion

  Many of the California tech industry’s leaders are unhappy with the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. This being Silicon Valley, they’ve come up with an innovative response: Secede from the union. It’s one idea I hope they won’t bring to fruition. California supported Hillary Clinton more than any other state, yet the election was called before its votes ...

  The issue of hindsight bias and fooling ourselves about what we think knew a priori haunts investors constantly. We are reminded of this by those who claim they saw the financial meltdown coming. Despite the lack of proof, they remain convinced they knew what was about to happen all along. These folks are fooling themselves. Due to several cognitive ...

  Matthew Winkler There’s been nothing but trouble for much of Africa as the price of oil plummeted 55 percent during the past two and a half years. But there’s a brighter side to the sub-Saharan continent. Unlike Nigeria, where oil accounts for more than 90 percent of exports, or South Africa, which never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis ...

  The Republican Party resembles the man who told his psychiatrist, “I have an identity problem, and so do I.” The party’s leader is at best indifferent to, and often is hostile to, much of the party’s recent catechism: limited government, the rule of law, a restrained executive, fiscal probity, entitlement reforms, free trade, the general efficiency and equity of ...

Donald Trump proclaimed “America First” on his way to his head-spinning victory in Tuesday’s presidential election, and the success of that message will rock many foreign capitals where leaders have feared that Trump would alter the basics of U.S. foreign policy. Making predictions about Trump’s foreign policy is difficult, given his lack of experience. But the most likely bet is ...

  The planet’s wealthiest and most powerful countries face a slow-moving but potentially devastating political and economic crisis. It now falls to Donald Trump to find a way to combat it. Over the past few years, voters in much of the developed world have rebelled against the establishment. In the U.S., millions of voters supported an avowed socialist in the ...

  Rapid urbanization and industrialization coupled with the galloping population is posing a massive waste problem. The trash generated in our cities is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. A recent study by Frost and Sullivan indicates that the volume of total garbage in the GCC will go up from 94 million MT in 2015 to 120 million annually by 2020. ...

  As the UK begins the long, difficult process of building a post-Brexit trade architecture with the rest of the world, the government may be tempted to mobilize the country’s overseas aid budget in support of those efforts. While there’s nothing wrong with hoping that assisting poorer countries will make them economically strong enough to engage in increased trade, the ...

  Japan’s great monetary policy experiment is drawing to a close, and the results may change the way the world thinks about central banking. The Bank of Japan’s recent quarterly report says, in effect, that the central bank has done all it can do to raise growth and inflation, and that fiscal policy needs to step in and help. The ...

  Adam Minter China has big plans for Mount Everest. Although the south-facing side of the mountain, in Nepal, might be better known, the Tibetan north face also has a rich mountaineering history, and China has outlined an ambitious new vision for commercializing it. That may sound like an unseemly approach to the world’s tallest and most forbidding peak. But ...