Opinion

Cruise ships are big business for port cities around the world. But starting next year, Cannes, one of the world’s most famous ports-of-call, will no longer welcome them unless they comply with strict pollution controls. Passengers who choose to sail on dirty vessels will have to disembark elsewhere. So far, the industry doesn’t seem worried. It should be. Increasingly, consumers ...

To understand Elliott Management Corp.’s plans for AT&T Inc., it’s worth examining how it tackled a relative telecommunications minnow in Europe. The activist investor’s 2018 fight for control of Telecom Italia SpA may have provided something of a dry run. Last year, after revealing its stake in the Italian carrier, the fund run by combative billionaire Paul Singer started with ...

In the darkest days of the 2009 recession, Germany’s industrial output was collapsing at an annual rate of more than 20%. An unfathomable implosion but one that thankfully ended almost as quickly as it started. Some 10 years on, a crisis is brewing once again in the country’s industrial heartlands. The pain could prove more enduring this time. So far ...

Singapore’s property industry is coming to terms with the idea that, in about a decade, the city may no longer have a central business district. Landlords couldn’t be more chuffed. There will still be offices, but without the rigid boundary between places where people work, and where they live and shop and dine. Local developer GuocoLand Ltd. is among the ...

In 2014, when Brussels regulators began to probe Apple Inc.’s low-tax arrangements in Ireland, an unlikely figure rushed to Dublin’s defense. U2’s lead singer Bono, no stranger to attractive offshore jurisdictions, pleaded that Ireland’s multinational-friendly model had brought the only prosperity the nation had ever known. “We are a tiny little country,” he told The Observer newspaper. “We don’t have ...

In early 2017, a strange pattern began to appear. So-called soft economic numbers – surveys of business leaders and consumers — started to look much more positive than the hard numbers of investment, growth and measures of business activity. Many wondered whether the optimism that people were expressing reflected their rational expectations of an improving economy, or whether it was ...

If Donald Trump were to tweet that 9 is a prime number, that Minneapolis is in Idaho, and that the sun revolves around the Earth — “Make Earth Great Again!” — would even five Republican senators publicly disagree with even one of the tweets? This matters in assessing the wisdom of beginning an impeachment process against the president. If every ...

It’s all kicking off at the European Central Bank (ECB). Sabine Lautenschlaeger, the executive board member from Germany, is to resign at the end of October, slightly more than two years before the end of her mandate. Her exact motives are unknown, but they add to a sense of chaos at the central bank barely a month before a crucial ...

Jeff Zucker, the president of cable-news network CNN, is reportedly considered AT&T Inc.’s top internal candidate to become CEO of the entire WarnerMedia division. I can imagine what Donald Trump would make of this news. How should investors take it? WarnerMedia houses CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. and other media properties that made up the former Time Warner Inc., which AT&T ...

The world’s second-largest sovereign wealth fund is playing a dangerous game. China Investment Corp. aims to have as much of 50% of its portfolio in alternative assets by the end of 2022. That means the $941 billion fund is diving deeper into illiquid investments including real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds and private equity just as such trades are becoming increasingly ...