Opinion

Investors have done well out of the UK reopening trade. The reversal in fortune for many domestically-focused stocks has been sharp. But the easy money has probably already been made. Since November 6, the last trading day before Pfizer Inc cheered the world with positive Covid vaccine results, UK stocks have performed strongly. The FTSE 250 index, traditionally seen as ...

Citigroup Inc’s new Chief Executive Jane Fraser is facing an Asia question handed down to her from predecessor Mike Corbat’s time: What to do about the consumer banks? Out of the 19 that Citi operates globally, 12 are in the Asia-Pacific region. When Corbat took over as CEO in 2012, the unit — which now also includes five smaller consumer ...

Former Republican president Donald Trump is trying to block the Republican National Committee from using his image in their fundraising efforts. He has no legal case: Trump is a public figure and can’t stop anyone from using his image in the course of political speech. But if you think of it in terms of US campaign finance customs rather than ...

One of the primary rules of investing is don’t get carried away by the madness of crowds. Still, markets are signaling that many investors are ignoring that rule. Asset prices suggest that many believe most everyone will be vaccinated against by mid-year, or at least herd immunity will be achieved by then. So homebound-weary consumers will burst forth and spend ...

The Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic lockdowns have deepened inequality both within national borders and across the globe. Many low-income countries have suffered a severe economic contraction that has derailed budgets and created urgent financing needs. This has exacerbated debt-sustainability concerns, which were already high on the eve of the pandemic. Today, more than half of low-income countries eligible ...

Christine Lagarde has some explaining to do at European Central Bank meeting. Amid the fixed-income rout and soaring yields, the ECB has been far too cautious in using its most visible weapon: Quantitative Easing bond buying. The bank has bought only 12 billion euros ($14 billion), net of redemptions, over each of the last two weeks — short of the ...

Few things are as intellectually thrilling as watching an idea spring to life, capturing more and more minds until it becomes conventional wisdom. And there are few areas of law where this has been as pronounced as antitrust. Forty-three years ago, Robert Bork, who was a professor at Yale Law School at the time, wrote “The Antitrust Paradox,” which argued ...

The downslope of the Covid crisis is proving to be its own bumpy ride — and there’s no telling yet how long it will last. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about the disease itself, but in terms of grasping the impact of lingering post-Covid Syndrome, or Long Covid as it’s often called, we’re just getting started. As hospital admissions from ...

There are few more eloquent expressions of faltering Russian living standards than the rise and rise of discount retailer Fix Price Group Ltd., set to begin trading in London and Moscow. An equity value of $8.3 billion assumes sizeable ongoing appetite for cheap detergent and affordable cosmetics. It says everything that Russia’s hottest initial public offering in years is a ...

After about a decade of stasis, big things are afoot in the world of social media. Audio chat app Clubhouse, newsletter platform Substack, and video-sharing app TikTok, among others, are giving rise to an explosion of new conversations and building large followings for the early adopters. But even more importantly, the new platforms are partially unbundling Twitter, threatening to make ...