The trade war didn’t happen. Prepare for a few skirmishes. It was high on many observers’ lists of things that could go badly wrong in 2017. Buying and selling of goods and services across borders not only increased this year, but also grew more than anticipated. Next year may test whether that’s a durable trend or just an accident that ...

Chemicals, equipment, machinery parts. It’s not sexy stuff. Certainly not as cool as games consoles, image sensors and flash memory chips. But who needs sexy when you can have excellent returns on your portfolio of tech stocks. That’s what JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Japan Technology Fund did. It went for the mundane and posted a 107 percent return in the ...

Seven years ago, the US led an effort to address a problem facing governments everywhere. Each year, people manage to avoid paying an estimated $2.5 trillion in income tax — a giant sum that could be used to combat poverty, update infrastructure or lower tax rates for law-abiding citizens. Now, however, the US is becoming one of the world’s best ...

Monopoly power is a hot topic of economic debate. Economists are starting to ask whether increasing industrial concentration is choking off productivity growth, reducing capital investment, throttling or deterring would-be entrepreneurs, raising consumer prices, and reducing the share of national income flowing to workers. This is a good and important effort. But it’s also possible that with all the attention ...

Yields on 10-year US government bonds have risen 40 basis points since September, about as much as German 10-year Bunds yield in total. The more than 200 basis point difference between the two debt market bellwethers is increasingly difficult to justify. It’s the lack of yield in Europe that looks out of whack. Just like the US, growth is picking ...

Preaching morality while practicing cupidity can be tricky, but various American governments have done it for years regarding smoking. This mental contortion now has a new chapter. The four largest American tobacco companies (Altria, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris) are, under government compulsion, funding newspaper and television ads to tell — actually, to remind — people that their products are ...

Bloomberg A provision in the new tax law, intended to prevent American companies from shifting profits abroad to benefit from a lower overseas rate, might also hit the largest foreign banks with significant US operations. Under the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax, commonly called BEAT, payments made by US businesses to related companies abroad must be counted when calculating global ...

Bloomberg The last day of a bitter year for China’s non-bank borrowers proved to be especially painful: they’re now paying a record premium for short-term funds. As interbank lending rates climbed due to banks hoar-ding cash for year-end regulatory checks, the increase was especially significant for non-bank financial institutions, such as securities and insurance companies. A measure of what they’re ...

Bloomberg Egypt selected five banks to manage a Eurobond sale of about $4 billion, the finance minister said, as the nation taps cheaper funding sources to bridge its budget gap. The government selected HSBC Holdings Plc, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi for the sale scheduled around January, Amr El-Garhy said ...

Bloomberg Punjab National Bank, India’s second-largest state-run lender, will be able to avoid massive losses after the government forced delinquent borrowers to repay loans or face liquidation proceedings under a new law. The interest and bids received so far for assets put up for sale by India’s new bankruptcy court indicates that the bank may not have to take “huge ...