Opinion

  Donald Trump did it again. He kicked up yet another controversy. This time over his reckless comments interpreted by some as a threat of violence against presidential campaign rival Hillary Clinton. Trump comment at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, about ‘Second Amendment people’ stopping a President Hillary Clinton from appointing judges has been blasted. He accused Hillary Clinton ...

  Vivint Solar was on fire. Think of this as a sudden flare rather than the start of a long, balmy afternoon, though. There’s no doubt the distributed solar-power company’s second-quarter results, released on Monday, took the market by storm. But context is all, and you don’t have to go back too far in Vivint’s history to get that context. ...

  It’s hard to overstate the amount of money that has been rushing into the debt of developing nations. The biggest exchange-traded fund focused on emerging-markets bonds has almost doubled its assets this year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Dollar-denominated debt of developing economies is poised for its best annual return since 2009. Yields on the debt have dropped to ...

  Europe’s banks have had a rough year: Their stock prices have fallen so low that some observers wonder whether they are viable in their current form. Yet the most commonly proposed solution — a true banking union — is also deeply flawed. The euro area’s banking system faces numerous difficulties. These include economic growth that seems to be permanently ...

  Tara Lachapelle On Sunday evening, John Oliver bemoaned the struggle of the newspaper industry. On Monday evening, News Corp. embodied it. The $7.5 billion publishing company controlled by billionaire Rupert Murdoch reported fourth-quarter results that drew a dull response from investors. While total company revenue beat estimates, advertising sales fell 5 percent and profit was below expectations. The stock ...

  Like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a floating mast, many Republicans rationalize supporting Donald Trump because of “the court.” This two-word incantation means: Because we care so much for the Constitution, it is supremely important to entrust to Trump the making of Supreme Court nominations. Well. In a Republican candidates debate, Trump complained that Ted Cruz had criticized Trump’s sister, ...

  Citigroup has carved out an an improbable niche, given its history of receiving the most federal aid among banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The bank, which already has the most derivatives of any of its U.S. rivals, has been buying credit-default swaps from its European rivals, which are under growing pressure to quickly cut holdings ...

  Wall Street threw in the towel on Tesla Motors this week. Sort of, anyway. Analysts’ consensus forecast for Tesla’s earnings per share in 2016 finally slipped into the red this week. A few cuts in the wake of Wednesday’s second-quarter results took the estimate from a profit of about 23 cents to a loss of about 65 cents, according ...

  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived Russia on Tuesday for his first meeting with counterpart Vladimir Putin since the two strongmen began healing a bitter feud over Ankara’s downing of a Russian warplane last November. The shooting down of a Russian jet saw a furious Putin slap economic sanctions on Turkey and launch a bitter war of words. Putin ...

  There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008. It didn’t just fail to predict the crisis — most models, including Nobel Prize-winning ones, didn’t even admit the possibility of a crisis. The vast majority of theories didn’t even include a financial sector. And in the deep, long recession that followed, mainstream macro theory failed to ...