Opinion

The stock market’s longstanding skepticism about official real-estate valuations just got fresh support from a jumbo writedown at one of Britain’s biggest mall and office operators. Hammerson Plc’s results are yet again catching up with its depressed share price. The company resisted a takeover bid in 2018 by pointing out that its reported net asset value was higher than the ...

One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,” which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do. The first risk is that social impact investing ...

For decades, the relationship between the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India, has been held together by two things: hope, and shared values. Hope that India’s rise will not be too long delayed, and that the US will welcome it as an exemplary, responsible great power that helps maintain the global liberal order — because of the ...

When Boeing Co. CEO David Calhoun was asked last month how he would fix the 737 Max crisis as a long-time insider, he bristled at the label, telling reporters, “I watched the same movie you did.” Calhoun, of course, was hardly just an observer, or shouldn’t have been: He has been a director at the company since 2009. A pair ...

Who would have thought power tools and patio sets would be big holiday-season winners? After big-box retailers such as Walmart Inc. and even superstar Target Corp. came up short during the 2019 holiday shopping sprint, Home Depot Inc. rebounded with a better-than-expected fourth quarter. Same-store sales rose 5.2%, ahead of consensus expectations of a 4.7% gain. The gains indicate the ...

The US equity market finally is taking notice of the coronavirus, which now is spreading from China to other countries and increasing the risk of a shock that could cause a US recession. So what are the implications for the US economy and the Federal Reserve? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer because it’s impossible to anticipate what ...

Everyone is wondering when China will return to work. While it may be tempting to consider past epidemics or labour strikes to gauge how quickly that could happen, the industrial shutdown from the coronavirus is looking more like a natural disaster than anything else. It may even get worse. Chinese industrial activity remains severely depressed. One tracker shows an even ...

The prospect is tantalising: the Boeing Co. versus Airbus SE battle, but for the 5G era. Nokia Oyj, the Finnish telecommunications equipment firm, is contemplating asset sales and merger options, Bloomberg News reported. That raises the prospect of joining forces with Swedish rival Ericsson AB, thereby creating a European behemoth to compete more effectively with China’s Huawei Technologies Co. A ...

Monetary-policy specialists are furiously exploring ways to improve central banks’ effectiveness, particularly should economies fall into a recession — a risk heightened by the coronavirus’s cascading economic stop. The underlying policy motivation is the growing recognition that prolonged and excessive reliance on central banks has reduced the power of both conventional and unconventional measures; it has even risked making them ...

We are going to have this argument repeatedly between now and Election Day: Who gave us this lengthy economic expansion, which is now in its 11th year and is the longest in American history? Is it President Trump and his economists, who claim that their policies — tax cuts, deregulation, trade agreements — have restored dynamic growth? Or is it ...