There was little excitement in the air when China’s State Council convened a press conference on March 15 to announce and explain 83 revisions to the annual Government Work Report. A few equity investors paid attention anyway. Among the revisions was a proposal to promote the development and construction of fueling stations for hydrogen fuel-cell cars. It was a Friday, and too late to trade on the news. On Monday, Chinese punters were ready: In the first few minutes of trading, fuel cell-related

Viewpoints March 24, 2019

For several days last week, the often distressingly poor quality of China’s electric cars was a leading topic across Chinese media. According to one survey ricocheting across the web, nearly 70 percent of respondents said they regretted buying a new-energy vehicle. Many expected the industry to be targeted in China’s wildly popular “Consumer Rights Day” gala television special, which shames corporate giants for service and quality lapses. While privacy-invading tech companies were harangued inst

Viewpoints March 21, 2019

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan since 1990, announced that he is stepping down at age 78. The way he is ostensibly relinquishing power could be an example for a younger counterpart and, in some ways, faithful student: President Vladimir Putin of Russia.Post-Soviet Central Asian dictators don’t resign. The first presidents of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, who, like Nazarbayev, ascended to their posts while the Soviet Union still existed, died in office, leaving behind regimes rem

Viewpoints March 21, 2019

The Australian-born gunman who killed 50 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week cited US President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” with his murderous white-supremacist cause.Trump condemned the massacre and said he was being unfairly blamed for it, setting off a familiar argument over the impact of his fondness for stoking existential fears among many white people around the world. He has indeed spoken, like the mass shooter, of immigra

Viewpoints March 20, 2019

The US-led campaign against Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies has attracted much attention for the indictment of the company’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou. On Thursday, Huawei’s lawyers pleaded not guilty in a New York federal court to 13 counts of fraud involving an elaborate scheme to violate US sanctions against Iran.That case is no doubt important, not only because of the possibility that Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, could face incarceration. It is also a major ir

Viewpoints March 18, 2019

At the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly in Kenya this past week, experts and officials from around the world debated how to come up with the investment and innovation needed for countries to grow without dooming the planet. National leaders, nongovernmental organizations and others discussed, among other things, how to create more “sustainable patterns of consumption and production.” What really struck me in Nairobi, though, was what was not discussed: the Green New Deal being pushed b

Viewpoints March 18, 2019

Trade talks between the US and China seem to be hurtling toward a predictable conclusion -- the signing of a shallow deal that doesn’t solve the real issues dividing the world’s two largest economies. The coup de grace will likely come later this month in another high-profile summit between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.It’s time to admit the “comprehensive” pact Trump promised never really had a chance to come to fruition, precisely because of the way he chose to pursue it. What’s wors

Viewpoints March 10, 2019

Donald Trump almost certainly doesn’t want to invade Venezuela. Despite ominous official statements about keeping all options on the table, a president who has repeatedly announced his intent to end America’s “endless wars” is presumably not itching to start another messy military conflict.　Instead, the administration is pursuing a strategy that blends coercive diplomacy with brinksmanship in an effort to break Nicolas Maduro’s hold on power. That strategy represents a fairly reasonable approach

Viewpoints March 7, 2019

There are roughly 337 million users on Weibo, the popular entertainment-oriented social media platform owned and operated by China’s Weibo Corp. Roughly one-third of those followers have shared or liked the new music video from teen pop idol Cai Xukun since it debuted in January. That’s a remarkable number given how fractious China’s social media universe can be. It’s also almost certainly bogus.As a recent documentary from China’s state-owned CCTV network suggested, the groundswell of popularit

Viewpoints March 6, 2019

Investors trying to gauge how much appetite China has for stimulus should ignore official targets and look at local government bond issues instead.　Premier Li Keqiang set a 2019 GDP growth target of 6 percent to 6.5 percent at the National People’s Congress on Tuesday, down from “around 6.5 percent” in 2017 and 2018. While Beijing’s targeted fiscal deficit of 2.8 percent is higher than last year’s 2.6 percent, billions will be going to cuts in personal-income and value-added taxes instead of on

Viewpoints March 6, 2019

What won the Cold War? Stipulating that the West did indeed “win,” there are a lot of answers to that question: Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”; Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost; George F. Kennan’s containment; the Helsinki Accords; Pershing missiles; the slow rot of a corrupt leadership; etc. To that list I’d like to add … blue jeans.　There was a long history of smuggling American jeans, particularly Levi 501s, in the Soviet Union, but by the last decade of its existence it became a mania. An

Viewpoints March 4, 2019

The man running the biggest Nordic bank says that reducing the number of humans working in finance will actually help cut some of the risks in the industry.Casper von Koskull, the chief executive officer of Nordea Bank Abp, predicts that in roughly a decade, his sector will have half as many people working in it as it does now. And that’s a good thing, he said. Casper von Koskull, the chief executive officer of Nordea BankWith cuts on that scale, the finance industry “actually becomes more robus

World Business March 3, 2019

Chinese industrial borrowers are strapped for cash, as billions of dollars of debt come due this year. The ones that benefited from Beijing’s largesse should be most worried. Issuers are on the hook for more than 6 trillion yuan ($890 billion) in 2019, up 15 percent from a year earlier. Companies in sectors including mining and materials, capital goods and real estate make up 4 trillion yuan of the pile -- and of that, industrial companies comprise about 60 percent.For years, this sector largely

Viewpoints Feb. 25, 2019

China bears have had a bad decade. Repeated predictions that China’s large and growing pile of debt would lead to an economic crash have been wrong so far. The country sailed through the global financial crisis. It has weathered the slowing global demand for its exports, the drying up of its excess rural labor supply, slowing coal production, and the peak and decline of its working-age population. In 2015 and 2016 it experienced the bursting of a stock-market bubble, followed by more than a year

Viewpoints Feb. 24, 2019

If Donald Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi this week goes as the US president hopes, the two will emerge trumpeting promises of North Korea’s denuclearization, the proclamation of an end to the Korean War, and commitments by the international business community and multilateral lending institutions to transform the nation led by “Little Rocket Man,” in Trump’s words, into the “economic rocket” of Asia.　While there’s probably a better chance of pigs flying over Pyongya

Viewpoints Feb. 24, 2019