Opinion

When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s startup LoudCloud clinched a fundraising round at an $820 million valuation even as the dotcom boom unraveled in 2000, management expected cheers from staff. Instead, the first question was: “Why didn’t we get a $1 billion valuation?” Unicorn envy — the quest for those nine zeroes that grab headlines and open wallets — has ...

  As you will doubtless have been informed, world equities are now in a bear market. What happens next? The most excessive speculation has already been washed out of the system. Those warning of bubbles in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, or the growth tech companies owned by the ARK Innovation ETF certainly seem to have had a point. ...

  President Joe Biden finally plans to ease some of the tariffs on Chinese goods put in place by his predecessor — which is the right policy. But the president will have to do more if he wants to keep inflation low in the post-Covid economy. The administration needs a complete reversal of its trade policy: Stop promoting demand for ...

Deliver us from evil. The line is among the most familiar, in one of the oldest Christian prayers. Most of us are wary about using the E-word, because grown-up people know that few issues, or indeed people, can rightfully be characterised as either wholly good or the other thing, but instead exist somewhere between. Yet it seems hard to consider ...

It has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness. To be clear, current artificial intelligence systems are decades away from being able to ...

  Has the UK property market moved beyond cycles of boom and bust? London house prices soared in the aftermath of the financial crisis but have since largely flatlined. Now real estate throughout the UK is facing stiff headwinds, and the red flags are popping up. Interest rates are rising and economists expect more increases. Buyer inquiries fell in May ...

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has catapulted a European debate long relegated to footnotes right into the headlines. Does “Europe” need its own nuclear arsenal to deter a potential Russian strike, now or in future? During most of the Cold War and the years since, that question seemed settled. The European Nato members are meant to shelter under America’s nuclear ...

Facing intense pressure to bring down inflation any way they can, members of US President Joe Biden’s administration are reviewing whether to drop some of the billions in tariffs on China imposed by their predecessors. They should — not just because of the cost to Americans of leaving them in place, but because of the impact on ordinary Chinese. The ...

The auto industry is set to be transformed by the shift to electric vehicles from internal combustion engines and the introduction (any day now, trust me on this one) of fully self-driving automation that will turn drivers into passengers. Ferrari NV is reluctantly (and slowly) participating in the former, but it’s resolutely against letting artificial intelligence get behind the wheels ...

  Could this economic slowdown be different for industrial companies? There are valid reasons to think so, but it’s becoming harder to make the argument. The unwinding of the pandemic surge in consumer demand for physical goods has picked up in recent weeks, with retailers from Target Corp. to Walmart Inc. and Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. sounding a cautious note ...