North Korean leader Kim Jong-un rang in the new year stylishly in a dapper Western business suit and tie, albeit still sporting his odd signature haircut. But the new look did not alter his core message: He wants sanctions relief, he wants it now, and he wants it before there can be any real movement on North Korean denuclearization.　While he says he is willing to participate in another summit with US President Donald Trump -- which he will backstop by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Put

The optimistic narrative about Apple’s iPhone business is falling apart in front of our eyes.　The company on Wednesday stunningly slashed its own revenue forecast for its first fiscal quarter that ended in December. Apple led by blaming a slowing economy in China and the trade skirmish with the US for worse-than-expected consumer transactions in the region that includes China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Apple said its first quarter revenue is now expected to fall about 5 percent from a year earlier.

It’s that time of the year when a middle-aged person’s fancy turns to treadmills and diets. Scientific literature on excess weight and health is expanding along with global waistlines, and yet, it is hard to find a solid, coherent scientific explanation for why some people get fat and others do not, and why some overweight people get Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and others do not.　In the US, beliefs about fat follow a science-y sounding quasi-religious narrative: Our prehistoric ancestors h

On Wednesday, China successfully landed its Chang’e-4 spacecraft on the moon’s far side -- an impressive technological accomplishment that speaks to China’s emergence as a major space power. Understandably, some Chinese scientists are taking a victory lap, with one going so far as to gloat to the New York Times that “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”That cockiness speaks to the spirit of great-power competition animating the Chinese space program. Chin

One might suspect scientists of belaboring the obvious with the recent study called “Belief in Fake News Is Associated With Delusionality, Dogmatism, Religious Fundamentalism and Reduced Analytical Thinking.” The conclusion that some people are more gullible than others is the understanding in popular culture -- but in the scientific world it’s pitted against another widely believed paradigm, shaped by several counterintuitive studies that indicate we’re all equally biased, irrational and likely

The optimistic narrative about Apple Inc.’s iPhone business is falling apart in front of our eyes. The company on Wednesday stunningly slashed its own revenue forecast for its first fiscal quarter that ended in December. Apple led by blaming a slowing economy in China and the trade skirmish with the US for worse-than-expected consumer transactions in the region that includes China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Apple said its first quarter revenue is now expected to fall about 5 percent from a year earl

A new year, a new central bank governor. Yet the first salvo to come out of the Reserve Bank of India’s policy arsenal in 2019 is encouragement of good old “extend and pretend” lending.Banks and shadow banks are being allowed a one-time restructuring of loans of up to 250 million rupees ($3.6 million) to micro, small and medium enterprises that were in default on Jan. 1, without having to mark them as nonperforming, the RBI said Tuesday. Lenders are being given an extension of 15 months (up to M

As the great unwind of global monetary stimulus gains momentum, markets are at increased risk of experiencing doom loops. Investors need to be prepared for these downward spirals, where shocks set off a self-perpetuating sequence of disruptions.There are five doom loops that feed each other in a financial crisis. The collateral doom loop. Declines in the value of stocks, bonds, property or derivatives tied to them trigger margin calls. These demands for collateral absorb cash or necessitate liqu

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shows up in Brasilia on New Year’s Day for the inauguration of Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, he should prepare for some bad press.The incoming leader of the Western Hemisphere’s second-largest economy campaigned like the strong men of Latin America’s past. One newspaper marked his victory in October with the headline: “Fascism Has Arrived in Brazil.” A headline in a foreign-policy magazine compared his political style to that of Joseph Goebbels.The

China’s annual economic policy summit has come and gone, leaving a wet lump of coal in place of stimulus hopes. Beijing will have to do better if it wants to steer the country to another year of robust growth.The economy started slowing in September, and has only worsened since then. Consumption tax revenue was up 16.3 percent year-to-date as of that month. In the following two months, it collapsed, recording declines of 62 percent and 71 percent from a year earlier. Value-added tax revenue has

In the first half of 2019, a billion Asians will elect the next leaders of the region‘s two largest democracies. Half -- 400 million in India, and 79 million in Indonesia -- are from the millennial generation, born roughly between 1982 and 2001. Many will cast ballots for the first time. Although the threat of sectarian hatred looms large over both the Indian and Indonesian elections, economics will still take center stage.The issue that will resonate most with younger voters is jobs.Indonesia’s

Women hold up half of the sky, or so Communist China’s founding father, Mao Zedong, liked to say. These days, that’s certainly the case in Vietnam. 　Throughout the country, many well-known businesses are run by women. There’s Mai Kieu Lien, who captured the rising middle class’s thirst for protein-rich milk drinks and built Vietnam Dairy Products JSC into a $10 billion empire. Then there’s Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, founder of budget airline VietJet Aviation JSC, who became Vietnam’s first female b

Eight years after supplying the spark that lit the Arab Spring, Tunisia is again bracing for political upheaval in 2019. Prime Minister Youssef Chahed is openly scrapping with President Beji Caid Essebsi, who has in turn broken his four-year partnership with the powerful Islamist Ennahda party, the single largest party in parliament. As the head of a coalition government, Chahed is under increasing pressure from public-sector unions over salaries, and the sale of state-owned companies. Meanwhile

As US political parties diverge ever more distinctly into a defender of the old and the past versus an advocate of the young and the future, corporate America -- at least the parts with consumer-facing business -- is increasingly two-faced.　To the multiracial, cosmopolitan younger America with money to spend, it shows the face of the future. Meanwhile, to secure its tax preferences, deregulation and clampdown on labor rights, it spends its political money on the party of Fox News.　It’s amazing t

In a recent column, I observed that by many measures, China is the world’s largest economy. This means a number of benefits will now flow to China that used to go to the US and Europe. Chief among these is agglomeration, or the tendency of businesses to seek out the biggest markets and the densest concentrations of economic activity. Being the center of the global economy really does have value.　But nothing is certain, especially in realms as complex as economics and politics. China’s vast size

President Donald Trump is on the verge of making a spectacularly bad decision. The White House is soon expected to announce its plans to remove the 2,000 US troops now serving in northeastern Syria.This is not totally unexpected. Trump ran for president in part on the idea of smashing the Islamic State group, but he also said there was no point in trying to stabilize the country after the terrorists were defeated. Since getting elected, he has regularly signaled that its time for US forces to le

Most lists of the year’s best books reflect the personal tastes of those who produce them. This list is different. It’s entirely objective. What unites these five books is that nothing is rote or by-the-numbers about them. Each of them crackles with a kind of demonic energy.“A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility,” by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer.What caused the financial crisis of 2008? What’s likely to cause future crises? Gennaioli and Shleifer offer an origi

Nobody can know if, when Deng Xiaoping launched his strategy of “Reform and Opening Up” 40 years ago, even he could have predicted the near-miraculous transformation of the Chinese economy that would follow. In the years since, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty and into the ranks of the global middle class; China’s industrial heartland became the workshop of the world; and it has muscled its way into the first ranks of global powers.Yet the tone with which Chinese Commu

The arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Canada at the request of the US has further ramped up the tension and rancor between Washington and Beijing. It is also forcing a reckoning about the role of Chinese money in America.Members of the Twitterverse have begun to point out that certain US think tanks have accepted money from Huawei, which the US government considers to be linked to China’s intelligence apparatus. Yet they are not the only academic and research instituti

Japan’s police recently threw the chairman of Nissan Motor Co. into a jail cell. Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-born executive with French and Lebanese citizenship, has been accused of falsifying financial reports and hiding $44 million of personal income.Ghosn is unlikely to receive anything resembling justice. Officially, under Japanese law, a suspect can be held and questioned for 23 days without being charged. During this time he can be interrogated for as long as eight hours a day with no lawyer