Opinion

After more than five years in power, Xi Jinping has constructed a singular political persona: of a leader who places the Communist Party and its authority above all, on top of the state, the economy and military. So it may have come as a surprise to see Xi usher China’s top entrepreneurs into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People earlier ...

If some of the most august independent analysts in the business feel their future lies inside a large US broker, does any research boutique have a future? There is still hope. Autonomous Research, the London-based firm set up in 2009 by Stuart Graham, the former head of Merrill Lynch & Co.’s European bank-stocks team, agreed to be taken over by ...

There’s no denying it now. The global electronics industry is in a funk, and the world’s biggest manufacturer has the wounds to prove it. Foxconn Technology Group aims to cut $2.9 billion in costs next year, Bloomberg News’s Debby Wu reported, citing an internal company memo that she had seen. You may know Foxconn as the assembler of iPhones for ...

Bangkok may be among the world’s top 10 tourism destinations, but for overseas investors it’s about as popular as a beach holiday in the Arctic. Foreigners sold a net $8.7 billion or so of Thai stocks this year, the most since data began in the late 1990s. On the face of it, that’s a puzzle. Thailand has been something of ...

When Theresa May unveiled her draft agreement with the European Union (EU) on the terms of Britain’s exit, the reaction was exactly as expected. Remainers despaired because the deal is so much worse than staying in the union. Leavers despaired because the deal is Brexit in name only. But that was bound to happen, right? Whatever variant of the earlier much-derided ...

South Koreans are worried about the surveillance state. At a recent conference that was supposed to be about protests, journalists invariably asked me one question: How do we maintain democracy in an age when governments and companies are collecting ever more data on everything we do? They’re right to be concerned. If people don’t recognise the danger, they might eventually ...

Here’s a simple four-word wish for Thanksgiving 2018 — a day when most of us take a break from the blurring, dizzying speed of our internet world: Let’s slow things down. I don’t just mean stopping to smell the roses, or taking a hike in the woods, or hiding our screens for a few hours. I mean, literally: Slow down ...

In economic terms, Americans have a lot to be thankful for this year. Unemployment is at record lows, more people are actually working (as opposed to dropping out of the workforce), and wage growth is improving for workers on the low end of the scale. Other countries, when recovering after a big financial crisis, have suffered though a “lost decade” ...

A corporate battle at Telecom Italia SpA shows why it’s tough to be an investor in Italy these days. The government is interfering with a private company to get hold of its most prized asset: the country’s phone and broadband network. The opposition tacitly supports the plan. Italy is playing fast and loose with property rights and no one seems ...

How did Facebook Inc., mere distributor of clicks and likes, become the nexus of so many crises? And why does it always seem to make things worse? Facing global criticism over privacy breaches and the Russian disinformation campaign, according to the New York Times, Facebook dissembled publicly, stifled dissent internally, called in political favors, and hired a consulting firm to ...