When Europeans began arriving in the New World at the end of the 15th century, they used the region to source silver, gold, coffee, and wool. Today, China is the foremost trading partner with several Latin American countries, and buys oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador; iron ore from Brazil; beef from Argentina; and copper… more
On February 1, at China's Guangzhou Railway Station—a battle royale on a good day—a snowstorm stranded tens of thousands of passengers. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was the beginning of the world’s largest annual human migration, the Lunar New Year, when reuniting Chinese families run up three billion trips in a matter of… more
You can sum up what's happened to the Chinese stock market this summer in a few quick figures. If you'd invested in the Shanghai Composite a year ago—August of 2014—when the index was around 2,200 points, your investment would have increased in value by 45 percent through today. If you'd waited until Jan. 1, 2015… more
In Brockton, Massachusetts, you can purchase a car at Shoe City Auto Sales, drive it to the Shoe City Tavern, and afterward, recycle your bottle at the Shoe City Redemption Center. What you can’t do is manufacture a shoe—not since 2009, when workers at Brockton’s last remaining shoe factory, FootJoy, threaded their final eyelets and… more
