The National Science Foundation and the National Science Board have just released their biennial ‘Science & Engineering Indicators,’ a voluminous document describing the state of American technology. There are facts and figures on research and development, innovation and engineers. But the report’s main conclusion lies elsewhere: China has become — or is on the verge of becoming — a scientific ...

I think we can all agree that, absent a war or some deliberate strategy, a 14 percent drop in a country’s oil production in the space of one year is not a good thing. Even worse, though, is a 29 percent drop. These two realities, both undesirable, were presented for Venezuela in OPEC’s latest monthly report, out recently. The oil-exporters’ ...

If you’re hung up on the potential upside (or pitfalls) of Bitcoin mining for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., then you may be missing an even bigger story. Cash. Yup, good old cash. You remember the stuff; it’s used for tipping bellhops, filling red envelopes and shoving under mattresses. TSMC, which makes chips for Apple Inc. and for Bitcoin miners, is ...

The performance of US Treasuries in 2017 confounded many, as the bonds kept to range-bound trading in the context of both higher growth and rate tightening by the Federal Reserve that went beyond initial market expectations. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the recent move up in yields has triggered so many reactions, including warnings that we may ...

What to do if you’re a 95-year-old billionaire and you live in a country with inheritance taxes as high as 65 percent? That’s the challenge facing the family of coffee baron Kim Jae-myeong, honorary chairman of Dongsuh group, who built a fortune valued at $2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Kim, who’s never appeared on an international wealth ranking, ...

What do carpets and coffins have in common? They are both suffering as the internet makes prices more transparent and consumers shop around. That’s the message from both Carpetright Plc, which has been floored by a slump in demand, and funeral director Dignity Plc, whose earnings will be six feet under this year. Analysts’ expectations for Dignity’s 2018 earnings are ...

As the world watches to see if Emmanuel Macron succeeds in shaking France out of its statist torpor, it should bear in mind that he would first need to somehow bypass the country’s entrenched mandarins, the elite-educated cadre that run France’s most important bureaucracies and whose cohorts tend to have leadership roles throughout French industry; they often have the biggest ...

Bloomberg The design for a new class of safe financial assets intended to strengthen the euro area will be published imminently after almost a year of delay, according to officials familiar with the matter. The report, commissioned by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, will offer a plan for bundling government debt from the bloc’s 19 nations into a security ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Randal Quarles, the central bank’s supervision chief, shared a laundry list of ways to make regulation less burdensome for Wall Street — including streamlining capital rules, overhauling post-crisis trading limits and making major changes to how the agency conducts stress tests. “Confusion that results from overly complex regulation does not advance the goal of a ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. may not be willing to help customers invest in bitcoin, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t plowing into the technology underlying the cryptocurrency. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender has applied for or received at least 43 patents for blockchain, the ledger technology used for verifying and recording transactions that’s at the heart of virtual currencies. ...