Opinion

When companies book a massive writedown, shareholders often just shrug. That’s because impairments usually happen a long time after the market has formed a fairly accurate opinion of the company’s financial position — and a charge doesn’t impact cash. India’s Tata Motors Ltd hasn’t been so lucky in how its own writedown was received this week. The 3.1 billion pound ...

India’s interest-rate surprise is looking more like a good one. In what may seem like an odd pairing outside cricket contests, New Zealand may have just validated the subcontinent’s contentious cut. Inflation figures showed an easing in the pace of India’s consumer-price increases in January. That’s what you want to see if you’re going to shock people with a reduction ...

France and Germany’s recent cooperation agreement – in which the two nations promised to form join positions on all important European matters – appears to have withstood a difficult early test. The two powers have forged a compromise over the contentious issue of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia. The connection, which will run from Ust-Luga in Russia ...

By his own admission, the boss of Ryanair Holdings Plc hasn’t done a very good job lately. Over the past 18 months, a scheduling fiasco and labor revolt have forced the budget carrier to cancel thousands of flights, offer better pay and conditions to staff and recognize trade unions. To his credit, Michael O’Leary volunteered not to take a bonus ...

How can investors profit from China’s race with the US for 5G supremacy? Finding the answer is as tricky as figuring out the geopolitics. The nation’s sleepy telecom stocks came back to life after Huawei Technologies Co. CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada in early December. While the official charge was that the company had violated US sanctions on ...

Beijing is selling its relaxation of inward foreign investment limits as a natural opening of financial markets. The reality is that China needs the capital to keep the economy going, and the question is whether investors will buy the hype. Authorities doubled to $300 billion the quota for stocks, bonds and other financial products under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor ...

Just how anti-European Union (EU) will the next European parliament be? Latest polls suggest that that populist, often euroskeptic parties, could do well enough in May’s vote to get a disruptive blocking minority – but that would require an improbable degree of cooperation on their part. Given the difficulty of placing dozens of parties in 27 countries on a single ...

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address had been trailed as an appeal for unity — and, by the president’s standards, it almost was. Despite some jarring moments, he made a passable attempt at a presidential tone, calling for governing “not as two parties but as one nation,” and speaking of a “new opportunity” in US politics for those ...

Many of Europe’s politicians are far from impressed with the European Commission’s recent ruling against the proposed rail merger of Alstom SA and Siemens AG. Some are now calling for the EU to change its whole approach to competition policy. What they want instead is “industrial policy” — a strategy that dethrones competition as a goal and promotes European economic ...

It was with a sense of déjà vu that I read that US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has asked the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee to cobble some together ideas on new sorts of debt securities the government could create and sell to finance the rapidly expanding budget deficit. The implication is clear: The US needs to attract new investors to ...