Opinion

Bitcoin is back, sort of. The original cryptocurrency hasn’t regained the lofty highs of its bubble peak in late 2017, but it has climbed back up to about $10,000. Predictions that Bitcoin would collapse have not borne fruit. Despite its bubbles and crashes, the cryptocurrency is now a semi-permanent feature of the global financial landscape. What it is not, however, ...

Dan Loeb’s Third Point LLC says it has a history of working constructively with boards to promote the success of their companies. The activist’s latest goal seems to involve removing the board of Prudential Plc entirely, and dismantling the head office around it, as part of a breakup of the $48 billion insurer. That may not be as hard as ...

The yield on a 30-year USTreasury bond has finally fallen to a record low of 1.83%, having dropped a staggering 50 basis points this year already. With the coronavirus outbreak forcing people to look for havens, there are few signs that this investor frenzy for long-maturity sovereign debt is going to abate anytime soon. The US appears to be headed ...

For a time, it looked like our defenses might hold. The extraordinary lockdown of China’s Hubei province over the past month had at times appeared to be halting the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. For much of that period, new cases outside China were running at just a dozen or so a day, most of them with clear connections back ...

A decision by Thailand’s constitutional court to ban the second-largest opposition party should be a boost for Prayuth Chan-Ocha, junta leader turned elected prime minister. Future Forward’s leaders were among his highest-profile critics. Yet the long sought-after victory looks Pyrrhic. The former general’s problems have been piling up. Thailand’s flatlining economy, already suffering from the worst drought in decades, is ...

It’s long been obvious that one of Germany’s formerly grand centrist parties, the left-leaning SPD, is in decline. But another and even grander centrist bloc, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel, had hopes of avoiding that fate, by defending the hallowed middle ground in politics. Suddenly, though, Germany is having a full-bore political crisis of centrism. Since ...

Many commentators have argued that the big winner in last week’s poisonous Democratic Party debate was Donald Trump. But as the world assesses the United States in this 2020 election season, the long-term political beneficiary may be foreign rivals such as China’s President Xi Jinping. The circular firing squad in Las Vegas probably raised expectations abroad that the Democrats won’t ...

Sharp falls in Asian markets and US stock futures on February 24 suggest investors are starting to catch up to the disconnect between the coronavirus’s widening impact and hopes of a V-shaped recovery. It’s a gap that has been particularly visible in metals. China, where much of the economy remains in lockdown, accounts for about half the world’s appetite for ...

Morgan Stanley is trading in its white shoes for Converse Chuck Taylors. That’s the initial impression on Wall Street at least after the bank announced that it had agreed to buy discount brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. for $13 billion in an all-stock takeover, the biggest acquisition by a large US bank since the financial crisis. It would add E-Trade’s $360 ...

SoftBank Group Corp.’s chairman took to the stage to gloat about the company’s return to profit in a horrible year and to name drop some of the wonderful companies in his orbit. But the most important name of all was missing: Paul Elliott Singer. Getting top billing in Masayoshi Son’s earnings presentation was Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which netted the ...