Opinion

The Mid Valley Megamall in Kuala Lumpur has more than 100 restaurants, cafes, and snack stands to meet every kind of craving. As of this month, that list includes a novel and seemingly quixotic option: Santan, a cafe that serves airplane food in cardboard boxes. As restaurant concepts go, “quick airplane food” isn’t an obvious winner. But Santan is owned ...

Internet-enabled industry disruption defined business strategy in the 2010s, but as 2020 begins, that era appears to be winding down. The disruptors have largely become the new establishment, and unlike a decade ago, it doesn’t look like the new leaders will be displaced any time soon. Today’s internet is a mature and mainstream technology. This was not the case a ...

For decades, Indian foreign policy has been moving slowly but methodically in a single direction: towards a greater embrace of the West. The days of non-alignment, when India believed it led the developing world in standing apart from either Cold War bloc, are over. Although successive governments in New Delhi have worked hard to avoid antagonising Beijing, it has been ...

Robert Stheeman has been at the helm of the UK Treasury’s Debt Management Office since 2003, overseeing sales of more than $2.6 trillion of Gilts, as Britain’s sovereign bonds are known. He’s the government’s agent in the debt marketplace, the link that smooths communication between the finance ministry and its 15 primary “market-makers”. His job is to keep the UK’s ...

How does an older bank unlock the value of a nimbler, faster-growing division? That was the challenge facing Bruce Van Saun, then CFO at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). He had joined the storied firm in 2009, after their £500 billion bailout of loans and guarantees from the UK government. Within RBS, the Citizens group in the US was ...

The US economy has experienced its slowest recovery from a recession in the post-World War II era, and the longer it lasts the more evidence there is that normal cyclical patterns are missing. And their absence means market participants shouldn’t rely on them to divine the economy’s future. Consider the myriad developments that are atypical, or even the reverse of ...

Over the last decade, scientists learned a great deal about the climate, much of it concerning the connection between global warming and extreme events — heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires. There has been, for many years, an understanding that a warmer world would be a more temperamental one, and measurements upon measurements show average temperature is rising in ...

Aston Martin’s parent company hopes to take on some new passengers in 2020. They’ll be clambering aboard the luxury carmaker as it careens headlong towards a decisive fork in the road. The reputation of Chief Executive Officer Andy Palmer depends in large part on bringing the market value of Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc back towards the 4.3 billion ...

The shock arrest and defenestration in 2018 of Carlos Ghosn, a jet-setting polyglot who bestrode the car industry for decades as head of the Renault-Nissan alliance, always had a cinematic quality to it: There was his detention in Japan shortly after disembarking from a private aircraft; the allegations (strenuously denied by Ghosn) of undeclared income and misappropriated funds; the grim ...

They were 235 days that shook the world, rattled China’s regime and refuted the most pernicious wishful thinking since the appeasement of dictators collapsed eight decades ago. Nothing more momentous happened in 2019 than Hong Kong’s heroic insurrection. It began with the April 3 introduction by Beijing’s Hong Kong satraps of an extradition bill that would have facilitated the sweeping ...