Opinion

  Elliott Management Corp is a master at forcing companies to do something about the gap between a lowly share price and their value on paper. But the activist hedge fund’s campaign targeting UK utility SSE Plc runs up against an awkward reality: Stock markets don’t always obey spreadsheets. SSE is a fiendishly complicated firm with a simple problem. It ...

While projections for the spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19 remain tentative, it seems to be much more transmissible (almost certain) and more benign (far less certain). It’s not only that more people are vaccinated or have some form of natural immunity, but also that the variant itself may be somewhat less dangerous, even to those hospitalised by it. ...

Prepare for omichristmas. Even amid concern about the new variant and increased restrictions, many consumers will still pull out all the stops to make up for 2020. Not everyone is on board, of course. In the UK, even before PM Boris Johnson’s decision to trigger his so-called “Plan B,” there were signs of caution in travel, drinking and dining. Trade ...

Amazon.com Inc’s ubiquitous cloud-computing network, the spine for a lot of digital communications and transactions across the US, went dark for several hours. The cloud has provided bounteous advantages but also excess — a cornucopia of nice-to-haves, much of it silly. Even comparisons don’t truly surface the most substantive threats to consider when digital meltdowns or significant hacks occur on ...

Should the House of Representatives be larger? A new paper by Lee Drutman, Jonathan D Cohen, Yuval Levin and Norman J Ornstein makes the case for a fairly modest increase of 150 seats, from the current 435. But 150? Or to put it another way: The pluses and minuses of expanding the House are pretty clear, but it’s a lot ...

When panic strikes financial markets and everyone runs for the exits, someone has to put up the cash — usually it’s governments and central banks. Indeed, the US Federal Reserve has again and again intervened to calm nerves and keep markets moving by buying up Treasury bonds and injecting liquidity. But as regulators move to fix more problems and reduce ...

Another big US airline is replacing its chief executive officer in a sign that the pandemic recovery is broadly still on track even as new Covid variants loom. American Airlines Group Inc announced that CEO Doug Parker would step down in March and be succeeded by President Robert Isom. Parker is the longest-serving current CEO of a major US airline; ...

As Leo Tolstoy taught us at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s a lesson being relearned by investors in European asset managers, whose shareholdings have woefully missed out on the gains enjoyed across the broader equity market this year. The environment for the fund-management industry continues ...

Earlier this year, Olaf Scholz, the former finance minister being sworn in as German chancellor, was sitting in on one of many coronavirus crisis meetings. He was looking inscrutable as he often does, which can come across as smug. He could have been thinking about anything, but a Bavarian colleague reprimanded him for “grinning like a Smurf.” By something close ...

Tesla Inc so far has managed to deftly navigate the supply chain crisis and US–China trade tensions that have hamstrung manufacturers globally. The EV maker’s latest worries show it’s about to get tougher for companies that hoped the worst was behind them. Joining a host of other auto suppliers looking for tariff exclusions on various parts, Elon Musk’s company submitted ...