Opinion

It’s not quite a stitch-up — you’d need the state to be a big shareholder for that to apply. But the $4 billion takeover of tech consultancy Altran Technologies SA by domestic peer Capgemini SE looks like an attempt to build a French champion without giving the target’s shareholders a good price. With activist-in-chief Elliott Management Corp. siding with minority ...

Jack Ma is riding high. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the company he founded, has won approval to forge ahead with a Hong Kong share sale that could raise at least $10 billion. On November 11, China’s largest e-commerce company logged more than $38.3 billion of purchases during its annual Singles’ Day shopping event, a new record. The rest of China’s ...

The island of Tsushima, halfway between Japan and South Korea, is about as close as you can get to the frontline of their trade war. Now part of Nagasaki prefecture, waves of Korean cultural, commercial and military influence have crested and receded over the hills of this verdant island since the Middle Ages. Here it’s apparent that centuries-old ties between ...

When times are good, focus on the top line and the bottom line will look after itself. When times are bad, you should do the reverse. That looks a lot like the strategy the world’s biggest miner, BHP Group, has followed over the years in appointing its chief executive officers. The question the resources sector should ask in looking at ...

New research from the Federal Reserve’s own economists reveal that estimates of the neutral real rate of interest are well below those of policy makers. The low estimates have important implications for policy makers and market participants, suggesting the Fed may still have some hawkish expectations of what can be accomplished in the future despite its dovish turn this year. ...

For Kumar Mangalam Birla’s textile-to-telecom empire, adversity is a 100-year-old companion. In 1919, when the Indian businessman’s great-grandfather wanted to start a jute mill, the dominant British firm, Andrew Yule & Co., bought all the surrounding Calcutta land. The Imperial Bank, the forerunner of today’s State Bank of India, initially refused Birla a loan. The government of post-independence India stymied ...

Now that German leaders have responded to French President Emmanuel Macron’s provocative remarks concerning the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), an unusually wide public rift has emerged between France and Germany. At its root, it’s about France’s leadership ambitions, to which Germany is opposed without itself wanting to lead. “We do want a strong and sovereign Europe,” ...

The economy has battled a lot of headwinds during the past year. Trade wars. The lagging impact of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes. A government shutdown. The good news is that with those hiccups mostly out of the way, the economy may be poised for better performance in 2020. The easiest way to show this might be the example of ...

Those who bought stocks as they soared to new records last week amid rising optimism for a trade deal are probably suffering buyer’s remorse after President Donald Trump said the US hasn’t agreed to a rollback of tariffs on China. Are those regrets warranted? As the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite Index all set new ...

You could smell the approach of Sydney’s bushfires two weeks away. Leaving my home for work last month at a time when California’s fires were at their most intense, the sandalwood odour of burning eucalyptus was heavy on air. Looking north from Bloomberg’s office to far side of Sydney Harbour, the normally sparkling blue water was a barely discernible smudge. ...