Opinion

An ambitious project to build the longest undersea rail tunnel in the world between Helsinki and Tallinn is being held up by the Estonian government over worries about the plan and where the money is coming from. It should let the life-changing link go ahead, even if its Chinese funding looks suspicious. The project’s developer, Finest Bay Area Development Oy, ...

Articles sometimes have a long gestation. One that I published this week had its roots in my disagreement with a three-year-old podcast. In this 2016 episode of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert assessed Google’s 2005 acquisition of the startup behind the Android operating system for smartphones. Rosenthal and Gilbert had a sensible view that Android was a ...

It’s time for investors to fight the Fed. A popular Wall Street saw is that the Federal Reserve has a heavy hand in the level of the stock market. The theory is that low interest rates buoy stocks and that high rates sink them, so by controlling interest rates the Fed controls the market indirectly. From that nugget springs the ...

Donald Trump sold himself to the American public as an expert deal-maker. At the top of his list was a promised trade bargain with China that would boost US exports and remedy some of the more egregious exa-mples of discrimination against American firms. It isn’t working as planned. To the contrary: The ensuing trade war between the United States and ...

Reality is beginning to bite in the FTSE 100 as some high-yielding stocks give up on generous dividends. But many British companies are still continuing to offer jaw-dropping payouts when what investors really crave is growth. The dividend culture of the FTSE 100 has long been an oddity. Its investors have received a far higher proportion of their total returns ...

With worries about a currency war growing and bond yields collapsing, investors have reached for their usual haven of gold. Only this time it has a friend (as my colleague Tim Culpan wrote): Bitcoin. Gold’s dollar price has risen 7 percent this month, Bitcoin’s by 18 percent. This apparent use of the two commodities as companion ports in a storm ...

Christine Lagarde is still to be confirmed as the European Central Bank’s next president, but work is already piling up on her desk. The euro zone is in danger of becoming the biggest collateral victim of the US-China trade war and Lagarde will need all her political skills to plot an escape route from the threat of recession. The euro ...

Summer wildfires devouring Siberian forests are hardly unusual, but this year’s are a bigger worry than normal because clouds of smoke have reached big cities in the Asian part of Russia and because the authorities have reacted clumsily. The extra attention from the Russian and global media is welcome, even if it’s tinged with unnecessary alarmism: Russia needs to start ...

Airlines are fundamental to the self-image of sovereign territories. The largest one in any country is routinely dubbed a ”flag carrier,” as if it was the leader of a naval squadron. No wonder Beijing has it in for Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. China’s civil aviation authority has ordered Cathay to bar air crew who supported Hong Kong’s recent protests from ...

In 1953, mountaineers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first confirmed summiting of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Recently, Everest has grown so popular that photos are surfacing showing huge lines of climbers waiting to surmount that same peak. On rarefied ground where once only Norgay and Hillary tread, now climbers are dying because of overcrowding. A less ...