The US government should not regulate social media. It should stay far away from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the rest. Any regulatory effort might well violate the First Amendment. Even if it turned out to be constitutional, it would squelch creativity and innovation in the very places where they are most needed.Until recently, I would have endorsed every sentence in the above paragraph. But as Baron Bramwell, the English judge, once put it, “The matter does not appear to me now as

Viewpoints Feb. 17, 2019

Japan’s leaders seem happy to rest the country’s fate on the shoulders of its women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to get more of them out of the home to compensate for a shrinking workforce. His deputy Taro Aso, on the other hand, had to apologize recently after blaming them for not having enough kids. I can hear women secretly seethe, “What now, they want us to work, have kids and take care of husbands?” Male participation in chores is notoriously low in Japan.At Davos this year, Abe rightfu

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2019

How can investors profit from China’s race with the US for 5G supremacy? Finding the answer is as tricky as figuring out the geopolitics.The nation’s sleepy telecom stocks came back to life after Huawei Technologies Co. CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada in early December. While the official charge was that the company had violated US sanctions on Iran, many in China interpreted the action as another attempt by the American government to thwart the country’s advance in 5G. Huawei leads the

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2019

The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why Wall Street sent both stocks higher Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the US economy. This merger isn’t born out of

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2019

It’s time India’s policymakers acknowledged the real problem facing the country’s shadow banks. What they are experiencing is no longer a vanilla liquidity shortage; the entire industry has crashed against a wall of mistrust.On the other side of that wall are a clutch of wealthy property developers and their middle-class customers, as well as teeming multitudes of poor. Everyone is at risk.A crisis of confidence has made financiers’ own borrowing costs jump. The excess yield over government secu

Viewpoints Feb. 12, 2019

The political crisis in Venezuela has pitted the US against a dictator who refuses to leave office. But the crisis has a broader significance: It shows that Latin America has again become an arena in which rival great powers struggle for influence and advantage. As the US faces surging geopolitical rivalry around the world, its position is also coming under pressure in its own backyard.The region has been the focus of global competition before, of course, from the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of t

Viewpoints Feb. 12, 2019

When it comes to the trade talks with China, President Donald Trump and his negotiators have more leverage than any US administration has ever had. Chinese policymakers are desperate for a trade truce with the US in order to avoid more damage to China’s economy by further pressuring its trade surplus and export industries.There is speculation that Trump has told his negotiators to “get a deal done” in order to put an end to recent market volatility, but that would mean forgoing a historic opport

Viewpoints Feb. 12, 2019

Close on the heels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to tax top income at 70 percent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has released her own big idea -- a tax of 2 percent a year on all wealth above $50 million, rising to 3 percent for those fortunes of more than $1 billion. The proposal, which would affect about 75,000 of the country’s wealthiest people, also comes with a set of measures designed to reduce avoidance and evasion.　The motivation for taxing wealth directly undoubtedly come

Viewpoints Feb. 6, 2019

Every White House in the modern era has sought to be prepared in case a vacancy arises on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump’s legal advisers don’t know much more than anyone else about the likelihood of a vacancy this year, but they are making contingency plans. Those plans center on the possibility that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 85 the oldest justice, will leave the court.At the moment, there appear to be seven leading contenders, who can be loosely grouped into a first and second tier ba

Viewpoints Feb. 6, 2019

Transparency International, the Berlin-based global authority on graft, accompanied its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 with a warning that corruption gains where authoritarian and populist leaders erode democratic institutions. A comparison of Transparency’s data with studies by Freedom House, which scores countries on the state of democracy and liberty, reveals a more complex story but leads to the same conclusion.Putting the two organizations’ country scores side by side shows that the

Viewpoints Jan. 31, 2019

If Britain‘s Parliament were the final arbiter of Brexit, Tuesday night’s vote would have been historic. It would have been a crowning achievement for Prime Minister Theresa May: Leavers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour Party members debated for six hours and voted seven times before a majority finally said what they want to happen.It wasn‘t any of that. The European Union has already said “no” -- in more languages and ways than is reasonable to count -- to the one demand the majority vot

Viewpoints Jan. 31, 2019

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about Howard Schultz that was, well, not very nice. Schultz had earlier stepped aside as the chief executive of Starbucks Corp., but with the company in a deep slump, he decided to retake control, and reinstalled himself as CEO. My column, written as a snarky open letter, suggested that his comeback would fail.Schultz responded in an unusual way: The next time he was in New York, he invited me to breakfast. He made no effort to tell me why my column was wrong. Ins

Viewpoints Jan. 30, 2019

As another European Commission megafine on Alphabet nears, it prompts the question: can the Google parent ever free itself from the specter of penalties from the region’s regulators? The same goes for Amazon and Facebook, each of which is facing scrutiny for how it handles data. They could do a lot worse than looking to a fellow West Coast tech giant for a playbook.It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft was the European Commission’s nemesis. For most of the first decade of the millennium, th

Viewpoints Jan. 30, 2019