Opinion

They built him up. And now they want to bring him down. SoftBank Group Corp.’s sudden turn against WeWork CEO Adam Neumann highlights how the Japanese conglomerate has wielded far more dollars than sense in its investment strategy. Officials tied to SoftBank want Neumann to step down as CEO, according to reports over the weekend. SoftBank and its Vision Fund ...

What happens on Hong Kong Island does not stay there. The ongoing tsunami of discontent washes over this island, which, like Hong Kong, is navigating the choppy waters of relations with the same large and menacing mainland neighbour. This nation — which is such psychologically, if not in diplomatic nomenclature — has a presidential election in January that seems certain ...

In his new book on how to fix inequality, French economist Thomas Piketty may have gone a little too far with a call for a 90% wealth tax for billionaires and multimillionaires, but putting a tax on huge fortunes may well make sense. Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world, thinks so. His case makes it clear why ...

In some ways President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, seems like the opposite of the man he will replace, John Bolton. His current job in government is special envoy for hostage affairs, meaning he has had to negotiate with the sorts of rogues Bolton shunned. Earlier this year he negotiated the release of US citizen Danny Burch ...

The real impact of the attack on Saudi oil installations last weekend goes well beyond the temporary loss of 5% of global oil production: It strikes at the heart of the mechanism that’s guaranteed the security of the world’s crude supply for most of the past 50 years. Ever since the western oil majors lost control of output in the ...

With flashing red eyes and a swivelling head, Yuuji Ohta’s robot wolf bares its white canines and lets out an array of ghastly growls. A matted coat of brown synthetic fur covers its life-size body. This futuristic creature is part of everyday life for Ohta, president of a company that manufactures machine tools in rural northern Japan. While he started ...

Post-vacation blues don’t come much grimmer than this. No one was expecting a particularly bright future for Thomas Cook Group Plc, the UK package-holiday company that filed for administration in the early hours of Monday morning. The way the business came crashing to earth, however, is shocking. Rather than entering insolvency proceedings and attempting to salvage a remnant of the ...

Singapore is a major Asian refining hub, though it doesn’t have a drop of crude petroleum. Now, the tiny country is punching above its weight in data. The upshot for investors: An asset class that pays 51% in a world where earning even zero is increasingly a luxury. There’s a limit to how many bits and bytes even a busy ...

Not all high-yield bonds are on a hot streak. On its face, the US junk-bond market appears as if it can do no wrong. The average yield on the Bloomberg Barclays US Corporate High Yield Index dropped to a 20-month low of 5.58% on September 18. Investors poured $3.3 billion into junk-debt funds this week, the most since February. Overall, ...

The Federal Reserve has now lowered its target interest rate for overnight loans between banks twice since the end of July. The central bank’s economic projections and Chairman Jerome Powell’s post-meeting news conference suggest policy makers aren’t quite ready to cut rates a third time, and will need to see either weaker economic data or an intensification of the US-China ...