Opinion

Jes Staley, Barclays Plc’s chief executive officer, has a new spring in his step. After facing down an attack this year from an activist investor who wanted the British lender to shrink its investment bank, Staley has been vindicated. While a victory lap would be premature, Staley does have plenty to feel good about. His bank was able to preserve ...

Investors are getting constant reminders that it’s not cheap for tech giants to stay on top. Alphabet Inc. reported that its third-quarter revenue increased 21.5% from a year earlier, excluding payments to Apple and other partners that carry Google’s ads or funnel web-search traffic to the company. This continued the company’s nearly uninterrupted trend of quarterly sales gains of 20% ...

Matteo Salvini is back with a vengeance. The leader of Italy’s right-wing League had disappeared from the political limelight after he tried and failed to force a new election in August, falling out of government. A triumph in a local election has shown that he’s primed for a return. Italy’s right-of-center coalition — made up of the League, the Brothers ...

If the India story isn’t dead, it’s certainly on life support. The economy grew at 5% in the last quarter for which data is available, leading to a rash of downward recalibrations of growth for the full financial year. (India’s financial year begins on April 1.) Most recently, the Economist Intelligence Unit suggested that growth in 2019-20 will be 5.2% ...

The US Department of Transportation has published its most recent data on fatal motor vehicle crashes. In 2018, 36,560 people were killed in crashes, down 2.4% from 2017, which was in turn down 0.9% from 2016. According to the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatalities fell in every segment except for large trucks and “non-occupant fatalities” — pedestrians and ...

Stepping off the Eurostar train at London’s glorious St. Pancras station is always a thrill, but on a recent Sunday evening it felt downright radical. Unusually, I’d started my journey more than 10 hours earlier and 600 miles (966 kilometers) away in Berlin. I was attending a summit on decarbonising the economy organized by BloombergNEF and turning up by plane ...

It’s heretical to say so, but Russia has earned its current success in the Middle East. It’s using the same mix of military and diplomatic tools that made the United States dominant in the region for so many decades. America didn’t lose this battle for influence; it surrendered. President Trump’s efforts to dress up his retreat from Syria as a ...

In March 2017, as the UK prepared to notify the European Union of its intention to leave, the French newspaper Liberation splashed a picture of a traditional British Queen’s Guard on its front page with the headline: “Brexit: We already miss you!” Just below was the qualifier: “Or not.” That pretty much sums up France’s attitude towards Brexit Britain. It’s ...

Bernard Arnault knows you don’t get trophy assets at bargain prices. His luxury goods company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE will probably have to pay top dollar to win over shareholders in Tiffany & Co. after making a $14.5 billion proposal to buy the US jeweleler. If a deal happens, LVMH investors will need to put faith in Arnault’s ...

HSBC Holdings Plc will need more than a nip and a tuck if it’s to ease Chairman Mark Tucker’s envy of his JPMorgan Chase & Co. counterpart Jamie Dimon. Tucker told managers recently that more than 30% of HSBC’s capital was generating returns of less than 1% and singled out the American bank as a template to emulate. At roughly ...