Opinion

Tuition fees have become one of the hot-button issues of British politics again and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is expected to confirm the Tory pledge to freeze tuition fees when he issues his budget today. The Labour Party wants to abolish them entirely, endearing itself to younger voters. But so far neither Conservative nor Labour approaches get at …

During its first six months of existence, Bluegogo, China’s third-largest bike-sharing firm, dumped 600,000 bicycles into Chinese cities. Twenty million people signed up to use them; investors showered the company with $58 million in funds. But with rental rates as low as $0.07 per half-hour, Bluegogo’s days were numbered and last week the company folded. In an apologetic letter, its …

Now that we’ve all eaten plenty of turkey and fallen asleep on the couch watching football, it’s time for yet another Thanksgiving weekend tradition: declaring Black Friday dead. This has been a common theme in analysis and media reports about retail’s annual deal extravaganza for years now. As online shopping grows, there’s less incentive to wait outside in the cold …

Eliminating net neutrality is, in the best and worst case scenarios, either necessary to keep the internet up and running, or will lead to a dystopian future where a few major corporations control our thoughts. The more prosaic reality, however, is that a world without net neutrality will work just fine. I am therefore not incensed (or very excited) about …

In the run-up to the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, and immediately after it, the ‘remain’ campaign was much derided for fear-mongering. People are sick and tired of experts warning about doomsday scenarios, said Conservative politician and lead-Brexiter Michael Gove. Those warning that Brexit would cost the economy were dubbed “remoaners”; Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond …

India’s fledgling bankruptcy regime is turning both karmic and American. Eat, pray, love; applaud the shift. The government tweaked the 2016 insolvency law on Wednesday to disallow managements that have been “willful defaulters” from bidding for their own assets. That weird term has been defined by the central bank as instances where borrower firms didn’t repay while having the capacity …

The Justice Department’s new head of antitrust enforcement, Makan Delrahim, is getting plenty of grief for his surprise decision to challenge merger of AT&T and Time Warner. He’s been accused of stretching law “beyond the breaking point,” and of helping President Donald Trump act on his long-running grudge against Time Warner’s flagship news network, CNN. Actually, Justice is to be …

The idea that prices in financial markets reflect all available information — also known as the efficient markets hypothesis — has many variations: Some adherents think the process is immediate and precise, while others think it’s much messier, with prices often missing true value by a significant margin. New research suggests that the latter version fits the data better — …

The great Chinese environmental cleanup, now in full swing, is shifting the corporate landscape in unexpected ways and even stoking inflationary pressure that may soon be felt in supply chains worldwide. As President Xi Jinping’s government intensifies the fight against the country’s world-class pollution problem, companies are scrambling to adapt to tighter regulation while investing in cleaner energy. In industries …

China’s largest blue chips are flying high.There’s been a seismic shift in the notoriously speculative $8.7 trillion stock market. Large-cap blue-chip companies are the new darlings, a reversal from the smaller growth stocks previously in favor. The Beautiful 50, a local term for the 50 most influential companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, returned 33 percent this year. The Shenzhen …