Opinion

You probably know him as that stern, cult-leader-ish face staring from billboards on multiple continents, clad in wire-rimmed glasses and a starched button-up shirt, like some Steve Jobs of the sleep industry. Contrary to the haunt-your-dreams imagery, De Rucci guy isn’t the obsessively controlling scion of a long line of Milanese upholsterers. Instead, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper, ...

Singapore may have set its sights on becoming the world’s cryptocurrency capital. But its “buyer beware” approach to trading in risky digital assets doesn’t mean anything goes. A coin that works as a pension plan for BTS, the world’s most-famous K-pop group, is perhaps beyond the pale. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which had earlier allowed Bitget, a popular ...

Wall Street is trying to bottle ESG, but ESG has other ideas. Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds based on environmental, social and governance attributes have gathered a lot of money recently. They took in $51 billion in 2020, $3 billion more than during the previous 11 years combined, according to Morningstar. This year’s flows are even bigger, $56 billion through ...

Artificial intelligence isn’t always so smart. It has amplified outrage on social media and struggled to flag hate speech. It has designated engineers as male and nurses as female when translating language. It has failed to recognise people with darker skin tones when matching faces. Systems powered by machine learning are amassing greater influence on human life, and while they ...

For years, Facebook and other large technology companies grew into vast digital conglomerates by making so-called killer acquisitions, small deals for companies that could one day pose a competitive threat. Internal emails between executives at Facebook show CEO  Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team were quaking at their keyboards in 2012 as they watched WhatsApp grow to dominate the market ...

A prominent hedge fund manager has a provocative idea to fix the UK stock market’s addiction to dividends — abolish income funds. Paul Marshall, co-founder of Marshall Wace, blames them for starving the biggest London-listed companies of the investment needed to fuel growth. It’s a novel solution to a longstanding problem. Shares in the FTSE 250 index of mid-sized companies ...

Faced with higher-than-expected inflation, Federal Reserve officials have spent the past couple of weeks outlining their plans to do something about it. That may not sound like much, but it’s already working: As it turns out, simply talking about reducing inflation can itself reduce inflation. Specifically, Fed officials have indicated that they are likely to accelerate the winding down of ...

When General Motors Co’s $27 billion EV program went up in flames in August, it also singed EV enthusiasts’ high hopes for a new generation of long-lasting batteries that could take cars farther while keeping costs low. The storied American car company was forced to recall the 140,000 electric Chevy Bolts made since 2017. Turns out that the car’s expensive ...

What is going on at 3M Co? Shares of the maker of Post-it notes, automotive parts and Nexcare bandages have slumped about 25% since Michael Roman was named chief executive officer in March 2018. That ranks 3M among the top-10 worst performing S&P 500 industrial stocks over that period. To put that in perspective, consider that five of the other ...

The US government has worked hard over the past decade to stop Americans from hiding bank accounts offshore to evade taxes. But not hard enough. It has become more difficult to maintain secret accounts, but it’s still happening, as recent examples show. People who have dual citizenship, minimal connections to the US and a willing accomplice at a bank have ...