Opinion

Look inside your mutual fund: WeWork isn’t the only unicorn with a valuation so slippery that it’s worth $47 billion one day and $0 the next. Back in June 2015, fund managers from Fidelity Investments to BlackRock Inc. valued their stakes in Uber Technologies Inc. somewhere between $33 and $40 a share. The ride-hailing company is now trading at the ...

The White House is considering another round of tax cuts, according to a story by The Washington Post’s Erica Werner, Josh Dawsey and Jeff Stein. This is a monstrously bad idea, but it’s hardly a surprise. It displays President Trump’s cavalier attitude towards budget deficits, as earlier reflected in his 2017 tax cut of $1.5 trillion over roughly a decade. ...

The internet came to life 50 years ago this week, with a simple message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed only two characters into the transmission of the word “login”: SRI received only “lo” — “as in ‘lo and behold!’” in the words of UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock. The UCLA terminal ...

I hope Alphabet Inc. has a plan. The Google parent company announced that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy Fitbit Inc., a pioneer in the fitness-tracking gadgets that haven’t proved to be a lasting category of consumer electronics. Google has now spent billions of dollars developing homegrown hardware such as its Pixel smartphones and buying all or parts of ...

China has a standard road map for fixing state-owned giants that have gone off the rails: Create an even more inflated behemoth through a mega-merger, in the hope that the stronger business will be able to prop up the weaker one until the storm blows over. It’s a playbook that’s been followed in steel, shipping, energy and rolling stock — ...

In the hours before climbers were permanently barred from Uluru, the world-famous red sandstone monolith that rises from the heart of Australia, the line to ascend it snaked for hundreds of feet — past a sign posted by its aboriginal owners noting that the site is sacred, and requesting that visitors refrain from climbing it. The last-minute trekkers weren’t alone ...

There’s been some chatter in markets that the rebound in equities in October and a re-steepening of the Treasury market’s yield curve are signs that investors believe the global economic outlook is looking up – or at least not getting any worse. As indicators go, those are fine, but perhaps the most telling may be the dollar. The Bloomberg Dollar ...

People have a love-hate relationship with the futures markets. Futures are either financial drivers of rapid economic growth, turbocharging small amounts of capital to outflank entrenched barriers to innovation, or — to a populist — they are demonic pits where speculators manipulate prices and corrupt honest real economic activity. Since people also love or hate cryptocurrency, the rise of Bitcoin ...

At last month’s meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), I repeatedly heard the same dismal view: The global economy is in for low growth and historically low interest rates for a long time. “Low for long” isn’t even the worst of it. In the event of a new recession, governments have limited monetary and fiscal firepower ...

It’s rare for a European bank to be adding businesses nowadays, as capital constraints curtail dealmaking. The takeover of Deutsche Bank AG’s hedge fund activities by France’s BNP Paribas SA is an exception. There’s no mistaking what’s driving BNP: Absorbing a larger competitor with a chunky client base is one way to try to salvage its own ailing hedge fund ...