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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. ...

Bloomberg It’s been 18 months since the Federal Reserve’s first post-crisis increase in interest rates. Four hikes in, investors in the $14 trillion Treasuries market are laughing all the way to the bank. The 10-year yield ended last week at 2.15 percent, after touching the lowest levels of 2017 as weaker-than-forecast inflation data stoked speculation that the Fed was erring ...

Bloomberg Fears that a selloff in technology stocks would spur a deeper rift in equities were assuaged as the S&P 500 Index ended the week little changed, despite continued weakness in some of market’s biggest winners. The Nasdaq 100 fell 1.1 percent, bringing its two-week drop to 3.4 percent, the worst slide of that length since November. The culprit was ...

Bloomberg Zhou Xiaochuan is breaking stride with Janet Yellen. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor refrained from following the Federal Reserve in raising borrowing costs, a switch from March when the central bank increased money-market costs hours after its US counterpart tightened. The shift suggests Zhou sees more autonomy to address domestic challenges, with the yuan holding stable and ...