Opinion

Lyft Inc. filled in a few blanks about its closely watched initial public offering. The company can’t answer the essential question of whether its business is viable or what price investors should put on the company’s potential and its pitfalls. First, the new hard numbers. Lyft disclosed in an amended investor document that it plans to sell about 30.8 million ...

It’s amazing what a bit of chest-beating and military posturing can do. India’s war of words with and air strikes on Pakistan have reinvigorated the re-election campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Opinion polls (if you believe them) are predicting a bigger margin of victory for Modi’s National Democratic Alliance than they were two months ago. A creeping skepticism that ...

Europe is no stranger to last-ditch emergency summits in which 28 countries try to patch up their differences in the face of a crisis, or on the brink of a meltdown, or at the precipice of disaster – whichever way you choose to phrase it. The only unknown is at which ungodly hour bleary-eyed officials will emerge with a solution. ...

The South China Morning Post published an analysis of the 210,000 licensed drivers of Hong Kong’s iconic taxi fleet. Those Toyota Crown sedans are a venerable design, released in 1995. More venerable still are its drivers, nearly half of whom are older than 60. Hong Kong’s taxi drivers are a service sector aging in real time, a microcosm of a ...

Luck plays a much greater role in success than successful people often acknowledge, and the same applies to business. Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA, which like its peers has been forced to ground its 18-strong fleet of 737 Max planes following the tragedy in Ethiopia, could certainly use some serendipity. While corporate fortunes seem unimportant when you’re talking about a large ...

When General Motors idled its auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, this month, President Trump adopted a familiar strategy: He issued a nasty string of tweets blaming other people and promised, in effect, that he would restore the past. Trump’s angry, backward-looking approach may still appeal to some Rust Belt voters. But in the Ohio and Pennsylvania towns that helped win ...

The banking industry hasn’t given Italy many reasons to celebrate. The country has stumbled from crisis to crisis, as it fought a rearguard action against the EU’s rules for handling failing lenders. The EU judges gave Rome a rare moment of joy. The bloc’s general court, its second-highest tribunal, ruled that the 2014 rescue of Banca Tercas SpA by the ...

If there was any lingering suspicion that the final months of Margrethe Vestager’s tenure as European Commissioner for Competition would fizzle out quietly, the last week’s announcement on Google has dispelled it. She’s imposed a remarkable 1.5 billion-euro ($1.7 billion) fine on the Alphabet Inc. division for its historical practice of forcing websites using its search bar to display only ...

Just when you thought the Brexit misadventure could get no worse, the speaker of the House of Commons stepped forward to turn it into a constitutional farce. What else can go wrong, one wonders, between now and March 29, the UK’s designated date to leave the EU? Prime Minister Theresa May met European Union’s other leaders on Friday and asked ...

Can mining be green? That’s certainly the ambition of some of the biggest companies in the sector. Rio Tinto Group last year became the first major miner to stop digging up coal altogether. Glencore Plc, historically one of the commodity’s most vocal boosters, has promised to cap production at current levels. “We have a portfolio free of coal and oil ...