Opinion

The world is wealthier now than it’s ever been — but only on paper. Much of this prosperity may prove illusory as a global shift towards less liquid investments undermines the basis of valuation. Private equity, infrastructure and private credit have become a bigger share of investment portfolios, making mark-to-market values increasingly uncertain. The standard method of valuing assets assumes ...

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for 2020 is a fairly standard list of conservative priorities. Trump would spend more on military and border security and cut funding for health care, including Medicare and Medicaid, as well as welfare programs such as food stamps. The problem with Trump’s budget isn’t the deficits that it would create. These would be substantial — ...

The European Union’s top antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, is closing out her term — possibly her last — with a $1.7 billion fine on Alphabet Inc.’s Google. She’d accused the search giant of abusing its market dominance to thwart advertising rivals. It rounds out a hat trick of fines against Google that resulted in clear changes to its business model, ...

The Federal Reserve’s policy makers left interest rates unchanged at their meeting this week, and the central bank’s new policy statement affirmed the “wait-and-see” approach unveiled by Chairman Jerome Powell in January. That didn’t stop many analysts greeting this uneventful announcement as significant. The reason was the Fed’s famous and increasingly confusing dot plot. Fed officials are right to be ...

Once the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put back in. China has discovered predatory online cash loans, and even an appearance on the state broadcaster’s annual consumer rights program is unlikely to eradicate the practice. In its two-hour special on March 15, China Central Television interviewed a woman whose debt ballooned to 500,000 yuan ($74,417) in just ...

A smug, entitled business class driven by greed and hubris, but sorely lacking in resources to legitimise their control. I could be describing the India Inc. of today – or 1959. Nothing much has changed. Jet Airways Ltd., India’s oldest surviving private-sector airline, is about to crash land. Founder Naresh Goyal neither brought in enough new equity of his own ...

For a central bank at pains to stress neutrality, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) may not be far away from cutting interest rates. Minutes from the RBA board’s meeting attest to the load being carried by the labour market and consumers. The idea is that low unemployment will translate into higher wages, enabling the consumer to step up despite ...

There are roughly 337 million users on Weibo, the popular, entertainment-oriented social-media platform owned and operated by China’s Weibo Corp., which reports earnings recently. Roughly one-third of those followers have shared or liked the new music video from teen pop idol Cai Xukun since it debuted in January. That’s a remarkable number given how fractious China’s social-media universe can be. ...

We Americans are all socialists now. That’s news. Since at least 1906, scholars have contended just the opposite. What happened in 1906 was that Werner Sombart, a now-obscure German sociologist, published a book titled “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” Unlike Europe, America was hostile to socialism, Sombart argued. Prosperity was one cause; it weakened revolutionary consciousness. ...

Oh, come on, it’s not that bad. Okay, so maybe Tencent Holdings Ltd. did post its biggest net-income miss in, like, forever. And operating profit fell off a cliff. And revenue at its largest division (value-added services) climbed an anemic 9 percent. But still, the situation at China’s games and social-networking powerhouse really isn’t so terrible. Even if things are ...