Opinion

Until 2011, Paul Bossens was an entrepreneur quietly running a small IT business in Leuven, not far from the Belgian capital of Brussels. Aside from an interest in the environment — he’s an enthusiast for electric cars who delights in his shiny gull-wing Tesla Model X — Bossens, 68, wouldn’t have called himself politically committed. “I was never really one ...

Aggressive, no-holds-barred shareholder activism has met with plenty of cultural resistance in Asia, most notably in Japan and South Korea. Now, it’s India’s turn to curb American investors’ enthusiasm. Or so it would seem from the latest twist in the fight over Zee Entertainment Ltd, the country’s largest publicly traded television network. “Sometimes, it happens that a company must be ...

Microsoft Corp is in the technology sweet spot. With another stellar quarter fueled by growth of the cloud computing business, the software giant is showing that it could have the best fundamental outlook among its tech giant peers. The company said revenue totaled $45.3 billion in its fiscal first quarter, a jump of 22% from a year earlier and more ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) policy meeting was meant to be a snoozer. The important decisions on post-pandemic monetary stimulus aren’t really expected until the quarterly review on December 16. However, the recent sharp rise in short-end yields will probably compel ECB President Christine Lagarde to come up with dovish smooth-talk. It will take all her considerable political skills to ...

China’s Communist leaders have always been comfortable with contradictions. How else could a party that rules in the name of Marxism-Leninism have created a country with more billionaires and wider income disparities than many capitalist democracies? It’s even baked into the governing ideology, which sees dynamic opposing forces as ever-present, with society moving forward as these are resolved in a ...

Mohsin and Zuber Issa were looking like the cleverest men in retail. A little over a year ago, the billionaire brothers and buyout firm TDR Capital agreed to acquire a majority stake in Asda Group Ltd from Walmart Inc, in a deal valuing the British supermarket at 6.8 billion pounds ($9.4 billion). This summer they sold the grocer’s distribution centers ...

Amid all the scandals and controversy, Facebook Inc watchers were on pins and needles going into the company’s most hotly anticipated quarterly report in years. In the end, it fell a bit short. But with many expecting far worse, sometimes avoiding disaster is good enough. The social-media company posted third-quarter sales figures that slightly missed Wall Street’s expectations. Revenue in ...

It’s being called the Great Resignation. Quits are at their highest rate in 20 years and no one seems to understand why. One thing is for sure: the labour market has gone weird. People are leaving their jobs without having a new one lined up, pushing up unemployment rates even as wages rise and companies complain they can’t find enough ...

It’s no wonder Boris Johnson is trying to manage expectations for the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. There are risks in hosting the most important global confab the world has seen in a long time. Key guests may cancel, complain or renege on their promises. Sudden events could intervene. And these are just some of the headaches facing ...

The US-China rivalry can be seen through many lenses. It is, as President Joe Biden has said, a competition between democracy and autocracy. It is a contest between an established power and the upstart seeking to claim its place. It is a race to master advanced technologies that will drive economic growth and military strength in the 21st century. But ...