Opinion

Any thoughts that the sheer size of Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s omnipotent chat app would slow it down appear unjustified. Monthly active users for WeChat hit 1.083 billion in the September quarter, the company said. That’s one in every seven people on the planet. Even more interesting is the number of users it managed to add: 102.5 million from a year ...

The fight between Italy and the rest of the European Union (EU) over Rome’s rule-defying budget has only just begun, but it’s already causing serious damage. Above all, the dispute is delaying Europe’s plans to strengthen the monetary union. That’s an effort that cannot wait — because a crisis in Italy might test the resilience of the euro zone like ...

That obsolete smartphone stashed away in a drawer or closet may not look like a national security risk, but the Trump administration is contemplating treating it as one. Unscrupulous Chinese recyclers and manufacturers could transform old phones into “counterfeit goods that may enter the United States’ military and civilian electronics supply chain,” according to a draft rule. To prevent that ...

Indonesia has just delivered a strong – and unexpected – dose of confidence to foreign investors. The central bank was sufficiently worried about the rupiah’s slide that it raised interest rates for the sixth time this year. Only three of 31 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had predicted an increase. With the benchmark at 6 percent and a projected inflation ...

This season of “The Bachelor: Amazon” has ended. Next up may be the season of recriminations. It has been more than a year since Amazon.com Inc. trumpeted its hunt for “HQ2,” which was billed as a co-equal company headquarters on which Amazon pledged to spend more than $5 billion on construction and eventually hire as many as 50,000 people. More ...

The US-China trade war is looking more and more like a cold war. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, crackdown on alleged Chinese theft of American technology, and rhetoric have overturned decades of US foreign policy that had prioritised cooperation. Meanwhile, his counterpart Xi Jinping hasn’t budged on any concessions. China experts worry that relations between the world’s two most important countries ...

Italy has managed to scrape by with its 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) monthly auction of three, seven and 20-year government bonds on Tuesday. It has now completed nearly 95 percent of its annual funding target, but that’s where the good news ends. It is still visibly struggling to place longer-dated paper. Benchmark 10-year yields stayed high, even after the ...

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been lucky, so far. His country looks to have come out of this year’s emerging-markets rout largely unscathed. The ringgit has fallen only 3.4 percent against the dollar, while the MSCI Malaysia Index has dipped a mere 5.9 percent, compared with a 16 percent slump for the broader emerging-markets gauge. Beneath the calm is ...

A three minute conversation on stage at UBS AG’s Global Technology Conference in San Francisco helped wipe more than $190 billion from global stocks. Lumentum Holdings Inc. makes lasers for 3D facial recognition used by major smartphone makers, with Apple Inc. its key client. On Monday, the company announced a 17 percent cut in its December-quarter revenue outlook. That triggered ...

In India, crises move slowly. We’ve known for years that the state-controlled banks that dominate the financial sector were groaning under the weight of bad loans. For years, though, the government successfully kicked the can down the road. All those assets haven’t been accounted for yet, the banks haven’t been fully recapitalised, the bankruptcy process isn’t working to schedule, yet ...