Opinion

Edmund Burke saw society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. A failure to understand this relationship underlies a disturbing global tendency in recent decades, in which the appropriation of future wealth and resources for current consumption is increasingly disadvantaging future generations. Without a commitment to addressing …

Goldman Sachs is embracing the machines. The firm that has long cultivated an image of relationship banking and trusted advice — in reality Goldman was always more of a trading house than rivals Morgan Stanley or boutiques like Lazard — now says it plans to hand over about half of the IPO process to computers. Goldman is trying to portray …

Silicon Valley tech moguls are conducting an enormous experiment on the nation’s children. We should not be so trusting that they’ll get it right. Alphabet Inc. unit Google has taken a big role in public education, offering low-cost laptops and free apps. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc. is investing heavily in educational technology, largely though the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Netflix …

The Trump administration is determined to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — which created a single market from Mexico’s southern border to the Yukon — but the main political appeal of this policy rests on a popular myth: that “fair” trade requires the United States to have a surplus or balanced trade with both Mexico and Canada. …

First they conveniently lost their voice; then they miraculously got it back. But now that the pundits of India’s economic establishment are talking again, all investors hear is discord. The biggest casualty of the war of words between the finance ministry in New Delhi and the central bank in Mumbai is India Inc. Without clarity on where policymakers want the …

The Federal Reserve has prepared investors for a small increase in interest rates this week, part of its effort to get monetary policy back to normal. The central bank should deliver the quarter-point rise the markets expect — but that isn’t all it ought to do. Investors’ attention is turning to a new question: What does the Fed intend to …

Last week, as the shocking results of the British elections arrived, the most over-used sentence in Britain seemed to be: “I was wrong.” Another insurgent mass movement following Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star Movement in Italy had caused a political earthquake. In one of the biggest political upsets in …

Akio Morita, the legendary founder of Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp., once declared that “America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.” In an influential 1991 book called “The Japan That Can Say No,” Morita and his co-author, conservative politician Shintaro Ishihara, alleged that the short-term thinking of U.S. companies would be their downfall. Constrained by shareholders more obsessed …

There are now four times as many cryptocurrencies in circulation as fiat currencies. That’s amazing. And encouraging. According to the Swiss Association for Standardization, which maintains the International Standards Organization database, there are 177 national currencies currently in use. That list generously includes four precious-metals and four bond-market units (codes XBA to XBD, for the curious). The CoinMarketCap website lists …

In most countries, insurers are among the most staid and conservative companies in financial markets. In China, they’re becoming some of the riskiest. On the surface, China’s insurers seem to be enjoying a golden age. Over the past two years, premium revenue has risen by 88 percent and total assets by 49 percent, while claims are up only 43 percent. …