Opinion

Is Sprint Corp. a duck or a rabbit? Bear with us. Earlier, SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son showed investors a bemusing slide with an ambiguous image of a duck and rabbit. If you look at the picture from the right, you see a different critter than the view from the left. In his characteristically gnomic fashion, he was trying ...

Overall, it’s good news that President Donald Trump has declared he’s in favour of planting trees — it’s perhaps the one thing he has in common with people who care about the long-term future of the planet. Trees not only provide a habitat for wildlife, they can mitigate global warming, to an extent. Promises to plant trees came up at ...

Is the world losing its collective mind about coronavirus? So far 1,665 people have died from the infection — all but 45 of them at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan province, and only two of them outside China. By contrast, some 10,000 people have died this winter from influenza in the US alone, and worldwide between 290,000 and ...

If it involves a flurry of announcements, filings, subpoena disclosures, a stock with Lebowski levels of insouciance, a surprise equity raise and Larry Ellison backing up the truck, then we must be talking about Tesla. It’s been busy for the electric-vehicle phenomenon. Not long after Tesla Inc. filed its 10-K annual report, the company announced it would sell up to ...

When the history of our era is written, scholars will search for larger causes to explain its bitterness and contradictions, despite so much wealth. Was it globalisation? Populism? Economic inequality? Polarisation? Greed? To this list you can now add an unlikely candidate: the nuclear family. In a powerful essay for The Atlantic — “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” — ...

President Xi Jinping has an unwritten deal with the Chinese people: Give me total political control, and I will solve China’s problems and make it a global superpower. This implicit “social contract” had seemed to be working pretty well, until the coronavirus breakout. The epidemic that began in Wuhan in December has spread deep into China’s social fabric. It has ...

It isn’t just Unilever NV that’s struggling to sell more food. Rival Nestle SA now expects to come up short of its self-imposed sales-growth target this year, and it’s counting on acquisitions to put it back on track. While Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider met the lower end of a goal for underlying operating margin 12 months early, it will ...

Yves Perrier, the chief executive officer of Amundi SA, has said for several years that his aim is to make Asia a second domestic market for his firm. In 2019, the business started to deliver on that promise — which could pave the way for Perrier, who’s spent the past decade building Amundi into Europe’s biggest fund manager, to depart ...

Bombardier Inc. has given up trying to compete in the commercial aerospace market by selling its remaining stake in the 100-150 seat A220 program to its joint venture partner Airbus SE. The $1.5 billion full-year net loss that Airbus announced, alongside that deal, is a painful reminder of why Bombardier’s own large jet ambitions always looked doomed. In theory, building ...

How cheap would you like your natural gas today? Is zero low enough? OK, how about we pay you to take it off our hands? That’s what’s happening in the middle of the US shale patch at the moment — and it’s a symptom of a glut that could reshape energy markets across the world in the coming years. Gas ...