Opinion

Thailand has a plethora of innovative startups, from artificial intelligence to agricultural technology, but their progress is stymied by a huge problem that threatens the nation’s economic development: Big Business. Corporate-linked investors dominate the nation’s funding scene, said Charle Charoenphan, co-founder of Techsauce, a Bangkok-based startup accelerator and organiser of an annual summit bearing the same name. That’s hurting the ...

  Biotech, social media and cryptocurrencies are the usual hotspots for crazy asset prices. This year, though, one of the highest valuations offered in any US acquisition is for the sewer system of a tiny township in Pennsylvania. NextEra Energy Inc, the world’s biggest utility by market capitalisation, announced in June it was buying the wastewater system of Towamencin township, ...

  It’s a binary world. To an extreme extent, opinions on the market are divided, and they are split on one key issue: Will the Fed have to “pivot” towards easier monetary policy in the next few months, or won’t it? This question vitiates investment decisions in almost any asset you care to mention. Everywhere you look, choices are contingent ...

All week, a river of mourners has queued for hours alongside the banks of the Thames in London to pay their respects to their longest-reigning monarch as she lies in state in Westminster Hall. Tens of thousands also lined the narrow streets of Edinburgh to gaze on the hearse bearing the Queen’s body last week. Pilgrimage to bid farewell to ...

More than 15,000 nurses in Minnesota who staged a three-day strike aren’t just fighting for better pay and working conditions, they’re battling to secure public support — especially as evidence mounts that patients will die in their absence. A century’s worth of sentimental blather about nursing as selfless women’s work has left Americans ill-equipped to grasp the severity of the ...

  India’s official statisticians reported 13.5% growth in the April to June quarter of this year. This meant that the country whooshed into top place as the world’s fastest-growing large economy — and, incidentally, replaced Great Britain as the world’s fifth-biggest economy. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news about India’s growth prospects ends. Those GDP numbers were actually a disappointment, ...

  There were “no limits” to their bonds, declared the leaders of Russia and China earlier this year. More than six months, one messy invasion and a plethora of Western sanctions later, it turns out that perhaps there were a few. The slogan didn’t even appear to surface in the comments by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir ...

As Ukrainian troops probe Russian defenses along the entire front and only the Wagner Group mercenaries continue a small-scale offensive operation in the Donetsk region, the initiative in the Russo-Ukrainian war is firmly in the hands of the invaded, not the invader. While that can still change, perhaps more than once, it’s a good moment to consider whether the man ...

The project is fantastical: A $19 billion investment into semiconductor and display-panel sectors, with the creation of 100,000 jobs in a state with little experience in technology manufacturing. If voters and taxpayers in India’s northwestern Gujarat state are excited about this “landmark investment” they ought to read up on recent Wisconsin history. The US state bought into a similar pipe ...

  If ever there was a time for the best and brightest to make policy, the epic struggle underway against inflation might be a good one. Yet Australia’s central bank is shackled to an anachronistic personnel selection that has left it hostage to an era when little scrutiny was expected — or demanded. Some change is almost certainly coming, but ...