Opinion

Another day, another dollar — or rather another few billion dollars in surprisingly strong results from a big US bank. Goldman Sachs blew away the superlatives with forecast-beating profits and revenues across the board for the third quarter. You could almost hear the analysts throwing bouquets for outgoing Chief Financial Officer Stephen Scherr on his last call. Its shares were ...

When I was fresh out of the US Naval Academy in the mid-1970s, I was assigned to a destroyer that was preparing for a deployment to the western Pacific. Among many planned calls, one stood out: Keelung , at the northern tip of the island of Taiwan. It had a reputation as a welcoming port for navy warships — in ...

The last thing President Emmanuel Macron needs right now is a merger between two of France’s biggest employers ahead of an election. Given the manifest potential for job losses and reduced competition in essential groceries, it’s convenient that talks to combine hypermarket operators Auchan and Carrefour SA have stalled. But the political context will change, and the deal’s financial and ...

Profit margins will be more art than science this earnings season. Let’s see if investors like Picasso. In industries from consumer goods to manufacturing, virtually every line on the income statement is experiencing a degree of stress. In recent months, raw materials, labour and freight have become significantly more expensive and hard to come by. Struggling to keep up with ...

It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for the early months of the pandemic. There was clarity of economic purpose: dramatic cuts in interest rates and big fiscal commitments. The outlook was so dire there were few plausible alternatives. Conditions are much more favourable now, and ironically, that makes the choices tougher. The economic recovery is looking a little shopworn. ...

Drop in at Air India Ltd’s Mumbai office in early 2001, and you might have come across an elderly, white-jacketed man winding up the clock. With 17,400 employees and just 24 planes — three times the staffing level at major US airlines — silly tasks like timekeeping in the headquarters had become someone’s job description. Still, optimism was in the ...

The opening scene of a brief online documentary by Chinese state-run media channel CGTN shows jaywalkers in Shenzhen getting captured on video, identified and then shamed publicly in real time. The report is supposed to highlight the country’s prowess in artificial intelligence, yet it reveals a lesser-known truth: China’s AI isn’t so much a tool of world domination as a ...

By going officially and formally rogue, Poland may unwittingly have done the European Union a favour. In blatantly challenging the bloc’s legal authority, Warsaw is forcing the EU to decide whether it wants to become the “ever closer union” it claims to be, or to remain the malleable club of nations it actually is. Union or club — either way ...

That was one sharp hawkish volte-face from the Bank of England (BOE). Over the weekend, three Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members, including Governor Andrew Bailey, made clear that they are ready to raise rates sooner rather than later. The UK government bond market really doesn’t like it. Gilts, which UK Treasury bonds are called, have been the worst-performing major fixed-income ...

America’s biggest banks have had star-turns this year for investors betting on the global economic rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic, but the encores might well be done. Lenders from the US and Europe have comfortably beaten earnings expectations while the world grappled with economic shutdowns and re-openings. But with third-quarter earnings coming up — starting with JPMorgan Chase & Co ...