It takes a lot of guts to spend $42 billion in a single year on factories and equipment just as global interest rates are rising and economies are slowing. Even Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) investors had started to doubt the world’s biggest chipmaker. But the company’s confidence was on display again when Chairman Mark Liu told shareholders it expects ...

  The best political slogans are simple and direct: Think “It’s the economy, stupid,” or former UK leader Tony Blair’s “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” Japanese politicians don’t typically excel at these soundbites. That’s what made former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Three Arrows” of Abenomics such a standout — using a simple folk tale, it ...

  The corporate sector isn’t the economy. It’s possible that the economy can be brought into a “soft landing” of lower inflation and somewhat lower growth, and many are hoping for that. But it wouldn’t necessarily follow that companies and their investors would get away for free. What, to start with, would happen to corporate credit? There’s a lot of ...