Opinion

Both companies and the fund managers that invest in them are under pressure to pay more attention to environmental, social and governance issues. For the former group, that requires delivering increased transparency on an ever-expanding range of metrics. For the investment crowd, tailoring strategies to address the new demands means increased spending on data — at a time when fees ...

Apple’s reported plans to cut iPhone production by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2019 make increasingly clear that the company’s base of loyal users isn’t an inexhaustible resource from whom it can forever extract a rent through its services offerings. Apple needs to compete more vigorously in all the other markets in which it’s present, without relying on ...

“In my country the people can do as they like, although it often happens that they don’t like what they have done” —Winston Churchill, 1946 During the Second World War, as US power was eclipsing Britain’s, Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister, reportedly said, “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must ...

It’s an election year in India, with the world’s largest polls expected in the spring. The focus of politicians is, as usual, on farmers and rural areas and competitive pandering to both — hardly surprising in a country that considers itself a nation of villages. However, this narrative has one major flaw. India is, in fact, more urban than politicians ...

In Flemish, they call it a “Graadmeter.” In English, it’s a bellwether. Either way, it’s applicable to the layoffs announced by Proximus SA. The former Belgian telecom monopoly is cutting about 6 percent of its workforce as it accelerates the “digitalisation” of its business (though its statement does little to explain exactly what that means). Erstwhile national carriers almost uniformly ...

The conventional wisdom among President Donald Trump’s circle seems to be that he has no choice but to stick to his guns on the border wall: His base would regard anything less as a betrayal. Senator Lindsey Graham has gone so far as to say that, if Republicans fail to support Trump’s demand, it will be “the end of his ...

The ambition of China hawks in the Trump administration is to maintain American dominance by halting China’s economic rise. It’s strange that President Xi Jinping appears to be working toward the same end. The risk for any economy approaching China’s level of development is that it gets ensnared in the middle-income trap. Once the low-hanging fruit of urbanisation and industrialisation ...

The world’s first eight flight attendants took to the air in May 1930. They were all nurses, hired by Boeing Air Transport (forerunner to United Airlines, Inc.) to give early-era air passengers a greater sense of security onboard. As air travel became safer over the ensuing decades, nurses were no longer required in the cabin. Safety and security, though, remained ...

The current European Commission could go out with a bang if it moves ahead with a plan to grab more tax-setting authority from EU member states. We could find out next week whether multinational companies using various tax-avoidance strategies in Europe will have more to fear than they do with the current periodic harassment disguised as enforcement of the EU’s ...

Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But because his party is Alternative for Germany (AfD), one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as he is socially. AfD is a Rorschach test for observers ...