Opinion

Anil Ambani’s not going to jail after all, and Ericsson AB got its money. The Swedish company’s lawyers should take a bow. While the future of the Indian tycoon’s shrinking empire remains shrouded in uncertainty, at least questions over his near-term living arrangements got answered. Ambani thanked his “respected” elder brother, Mukesh, and sister-in-law, Nita, after avoiding a three-month prison ...

Every day on my way to work, I pass a branch of Deutsche Bank AG and a Commerzbank AG outlet located almost exactly opposite each other on different sides of the street. One of them will probably close if the government-backed merger talks between the two lenders come to fruition – but I doubt the companies are up to making ...

The US-led campaign against Huawei Technologies Co., China’s telecom giant, has attracted a lot of attention for the indictment of the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. Last week, Huawei’s lawyers pleaded not guilty in a New York federal court to 13 counts of fraud involving an elaborate scheme to violate US sanctions against Iran. That case is no doubt ...

Haruhiko Kuroda is miles from where he wants to be. About 200 miles. That’s the distance from Tokyo to Nagoya, where the Bank of Japan governor gave a very upbeat speech last year. Some interpreted those remarks as laying the groundwork for a shift from the ultra-accommodation that’s been the central bank’s trademark. In terms of monetary policy, Nagoya might ...

Every deal in the payments business looks expensive – until the next one comes along. Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) is paying a heady $34 billion plus for Worldpay Inc. not much more than a year after the rival payments processing company bulked up with an expensive takeover of its own. The logic of the combination is simply greater scale ...

Germany has come up with a solution to the deep troubles at one of the world’s largest banks: make it part of an even bigger one. The people who oversee Europe’s financial system had better be ready for the consequences if this doesn’t end well. The Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank is in talks to merge with crosstown rival Commerzbank — a ...

Several theories explain why India’s new central bank governor took his boldest step yet. Little attention has been paid to the consequences. Last week, Governor Shaktikanta Das made an unexpected tweak to the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) traditional management of longer-term liquidity in the banking system: by buying and selling government bonds. India’s currency, sovereign-debt and credit markets were ...

China’s banks may have a flood of bad loans waiting in the wings. Not that you’d know it from looking at official levels for 2018, which suggest the problem was broadly contained. The reality is that newly soured debt was coming through the front door as fast as banks could shovel it out the back. Authorities worked hard to restrain ...

When Facebook went down for hours this week, the internet was all atwitter (sorry). Most of what I came across was fairly snarky, but a lot of the posts were pretty clever. I saw a variation of this retweeted many times: “News flash! Facebook down! People talk to each other, kids play with toys!” (Actually, they were probably playing Fortnite ...

Those of us who have always thought that Brexit — Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union — was a bad idea should be feeling self-satisfied and vindicated now. Well, we’re not; at least this observer isn’t. The reason is obvious. Many of the things that we feared would happen have happened, or might still. Worse, the consequences aren’t confined to ...