Opinion

  In every down market cycle, subprime rears its head. It may not take center stage, like it did in the 2007-08 financial crisis, but it always surfaces. When times are good, finance companies are happy to ignore the pitfalls of lending to the riskiest borrowers. When times turn bad, the problems emerge. Carrying the mantle this time around is ...

Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited Kyiv and Moscow, offering to be a diplomatic bridge between the two. The first Asian leader to make the trip to both capitals since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he made a few headlines, but no real progress. Critics saw the journey as image politics. And yet, Widodo’s not wrong to see a role for states ...

Everyone is stressing about consumer debt. Investors have been dropping the shares of big banks, credit-card specialists and younger fintechs because of fears about the pain that rising living costs and interest rates will inflict on borrowers. The weird thing is that households in the US, UK and much of Europe are in pretty good shape and showing few signs ...

  The most visible sign of trouble in the private equity industry right now is the collapse of one deal after another. You can’t do a leveraged buyout without the debt, and financing markets are seizing up. But buyout firms face bigger challenges than putting their stash of idle funds to work. The turn in credit markets has made banks ...

  The global semiconductor industry has gone from imploring the US government to hand out corporate welfare, to threatening the cancellation of investments should the money not come through. They’re desperate moves that belie the tenuous economics upon which an American chip revival is being built, and Congress’s willingness to risk credibility to gain political points. Intel Corp pulled the ...

Negative oil prices were one of the craziest moments ever in the energy market. At one point in April 2020, a seller paid a buyer $40 for a barrel of West Texas Intermediate. We’re going to need another crazy moment if Europe is going to make it through the winter. How about this: Pay consumers not to consume electricity. A ...

Les Maisons is a low-rise development of just 14 units coming up on Nassim Road, a leafy street nestled between the bustling shopping district of Orchard Road on one end and the expansive quiet of the Singapore Botanic Gardens on the other. As Business Insider described it, Nassim is the Lion City’s very own Beverly Hills. And right now, property ...

  Societies can suffer from famines of the mind as well as famines of the belly. Ideas wither on the vine; plants turn into husks; fields lie fallow; and before long the economic growth that ultimately feeds on the imagination stalls. This is what is happening to the world’s imaginative life, most notably in the West, which since the days ...

  Four months of fighting in Ukraine has brought staggering levels of destruction, from bridges to homes, hospitals and shopping malls. A recent estimate from the head of the European Investment Bank put the cost of rebuilding at more than $1 trillion. With millions of citizens displaced and the country’s infrastructure in ruins, Ukraine will be unable to support itself ...

The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a landmark attraction built in the style of an imperial palace that adorned the south side of Hong Kong island for more than four decades, capsized this month in the South China Sea, having been towed away after its business was rendered unprofitable by the pandemic. Social media users were quick to see a metaphor. As ...