Opinion

Germany made post-war history on February 5. In a total shock, one of the country’s 16 state parliaments elected a premier with votes that included members of a hard-right populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Worse, one of the AfD leaders in that state, Thuringia, is Bjoern Hoecke, considered to be on the party’s extreme — indeed proto-Fascist — ...

Indian food, when done right, comes in a thali — a metal plate with half a dozen or more little bowls of vegetables, pickles, and so on. The word of the week in India is “thalinomics”: The government’s official survey of the Indian economy, published a few days ago, introduced the word to talk about how food was getting cheaper ...

Bob Dudley leaves BP Plc having almost settled the financial costs of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010 and overseen a necessary overhaul of safety, and more generally culture, in response to the disaster. Successor Bernard Looney inherits a financially strong company. That only increases the incoming CEO’s responsibility to upgrade BP’s strategy to meet the climate crisis. BP and ...

For Google, a partial voluntary breakup of its advertising business might be preferable to whatever regulators come up with on their own. Whenever people rattle off big tech deals whose regulatory approval was, in hindsight, a mistake, they tend to include the Alphabet Inc. unit’s $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2008. I’ve done it three times in the past ...

An all-out push to revive its sputtering economy is not within India’s reach. Instead of spending meager local resources to rebuild faltering demand, New Delhi is betting that world growth this year will be down in the dumps — and that will make India appear attractive to foreigners even when it really isn’t. The budget unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra ...

What a difference a year makes. This time in 2019, all of the numbers at DWS Group GmbH were heading in the wrong direction. Four consecutive quarters of outflows in 2018 drove assets under management to their lowest in at least two years, revenue declined, and the firm’s cost to income ratio rose. The German fund manager was far from ...

For the first time in more than two decades as a publicly traded company, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. laid out a detailed strategic vision and financial ambitions to investors. Corporate slogans aside, the big reveal is that Goldman will be playing catch-up for some time. The Wall Street titan presented plans to add $5 billion of revenue and improve profitability ...

Just a few weeks ago, optimism was palpable in the heart of Shanghai’s financial district. UBS Group AG’s annual China conference enjoyed a record turnout and investors from abroad were enthusiastically buying mainland shares — so much so that some hit foreign-ownership limits. Now all anyone can think about is the number of coronavirus cases. The Shanghai Composite Index slid ...

Remember when we all believed in Emmanuel Macron? The question comes not from an angry trade unionist but a stand-up comedian in central Paris, facing a crowd of thirty-something urbanites cut from the same cloth as France’s 42-year-old president. A collective groan of “yes” rises from the audience, many of whom spent the winter struggling through transport strikes triggered by ...

China’s Luckin Coffee Inc. hasn’t been having much luck lately. The last thing a retail business in the middle of a breakneck expansion needs is a deadly virus that keeps consumers off the streets and away from malls. What could be more damaging? Perhaps an attack by short-sellers branding your business a fraud. Shares in Nasdaq-listed Luckin Coffee plummeted 11% ...