A consensus is building in both US political parties that Democrats are heavily favored to take control of the House of Representatives on Nov. 6 and to pick up half a dozen governors’ offices, while Republicans hang on to their slim Senate majority. But there’s a caveat: Politics is unpredictable with President Donald Trump in the White House.　It would be foolish to rule out the possibility that the prospect of Republican losses in the midterm election will provoke Trump to take some kind of dr

Viewpoints Sept. 11, 2018

There are already 170,000 small, unmanned aerial vehicles licensed in the US, and the Federal Aviation Administration predicts another half-million more of them to be airborne by 2022. Drones are everywhere, doing all sorts of things, including delivering hamburgers and beer to golfers. They’re taking group photos, scouting properties and being shot down by neighbors.　They’re also competing, and the competition is serious. Lockheed Martin Corp. has launched a $2 million competition pitting human

Viewpoints Sept. 9, 2018

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made an impassioned call to his compatriots to “show our faces” against a rise in right-wing extremism. The plea is a stark warning that Germany should guard against succumbing to the kind of boiled-frog effect that ended up killing the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. There is some justification for the alarmism.Maas, a member of the Social Democratic Party or SPD, became the German right’s favorite hate figure as justice minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s go

Viewpoints Sept. 9, 2018

An outbreak of African swine fever has China’s meat eaters, investors and bureaucrats in a panic. That should be no surprise: The country is the world’s biggest pork producer and consumer, and has a history of food-safety and health scandals that have fueled public distrust.　The government’s response, in culling 38,000 pigs, has been quick and efficient this time. But public suspicion, fanned by the handling of previous incidents, is running high. Authorities are seeking to censor social media p

Viewpoints Sept. 9, 2018

Donald Trump’s absence from Asia-Pacific summits will do little harm to America’s long-term standing in the region. It might even help.　The president’s decision to skip two international meetings in November was predictably seen as evidence of American neglect of a vital region, underscoring the unilateralist instincts of Trump. The complaints are fair.　But let’s not mistake pageantry for trends that have been building for years and look inevitable. American influence is waning in ways that a fe

Viewpoints Sept. 6, 2018

The stock market is a weighing machine of companies’ potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon.　Amazon on Tuesday briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It’s a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon’s market cap is six times what it was at this point in 2014, or a gain of $840 billion. It took Google 14 years to reach that stock market valu

Viewpoints Sept. 6, 2018

It’s easy to think of sports teams as massive companies: They have huge global exposure, millions of fans, and athletes on eye-popping salaries.　In reality, though, even the biggest teams are little more than minnows. The world’s wealthiest soccer team, Manchester United, has a market value of just $4.1 billion -- less than, say, Fevertree Drinks, a maker of tonic water and mixers with just 51 employees.　While the biggest teams have millions, if not hundreds of millions, of fans, they have histo

Viewpoints Sept. 5, 2018

Emerging-market stresses have been building since at least 2013. Investors may have forgotten the effect of the “taper tantrum” on the “Fragile Five” -- Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa -- a term coined by Morgan Stanley to describe their vulnerability to capital outflows. Monetary accommodation, lower current-account deficits and growth disguised the underlying challenges, attracting more capital to those markets.　The textbook recipe for an emerging-market crisis requires a lar

Viewpoints Sept. 5, 2018

From debt vultures and cooked books to fiscal time bombs, Argentine President Mauricio Macri inherited quite the mess. In his three years of office, he has handled most of these challenges remarkably well, drawing cheers from investors and his compatriots. Here was a decisive, business-friendly manager, talking transparency and free market initiatives to end what might have been “the largest populist experiment” in the world, in the words of Oxford Economics analyst Guillermo Tolosa.　Now the muc

Viewpoints Sept. 5, 2018

There’s no doubt that the US economy is in a boom. The Conference Board is reporting the highest levels of job satisfaction in more than a decade. This is probably because of a tight labor market -- the ratio between the unemployment level and the number of job vacancies is at its lowest level in a half-century.　A broader measure, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio, is back to 2006 levels. Meanwhile, real gross domestic product growth for the second quarter was just revised up to 4.2 p

Viewpoints Sept. 4, 2018

For a man behind bars, former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been on a tear. In recent weeks, his followers have taken to the streets in his name. Foreign celebrities and world leaders including a Nobel Peace Prize laureate have sung his praises. Even Pope Francis reportedly sent him blessings. No other candidate comes close in the polls for the Oct. 7 presidential elections.　That’s not half bad for the political leader whom two Brazilian courts found guilty of graft and money

Viewpoints Sept. 3, 2018

Last week, California’s state legislature approved a bill requiring the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. It’s a landmark for power sector decarbonization, and if Gov. Jerry Brown signs the bill, it will require a transformation of the state’s energy system.　California already gets 29 percent of its electricity from zero-carbon wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy, and it has already reduced statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. As I

Viewpoints Sept. 3, 2018