Opinion

Chinese regulators have stepped back from imposing hard-and-fast rules on how much banks must lend to the cash-starved private sector. Their exhortation isn’t going away, though, and that means investors in shares of lenders should prepare for more pain. Authorities will refrain from imposing specific targets for each bank and are urging firms to conduct appropriate due diligence, according to ...

Never before has one company’s failure had such a devastating effect on the world, wrote the technology journalist David Kirkpatrick. He continued: Racists, autocrats, and purveyors of hate and disorder have found Facebook the perfect medium for spewing poison, normalising it, and gaining adherents. … Societies around the world are reeling from the consequences. Politics and democracy are under duress. ...

America’s body politic has recently been scarred by excruciating political shingles, and 2018 campaigning was equivalent to acid reflux. But the elections indicated that some political antibodies are strengthening the nation’s immune system. November 6 was, on balance, deflating to Democrats, who learned — or perhaps not — that despising this president, although understandable, is insufficient. His comportment caused his ...

With Black Friday just around the corner, retailers are revealing their tactics for vacuuming up consumers’ holiday gift dollars. And with this year’s playbook, Amazon.com Inc. — often vaunted as the industry’s pacesetter — is surprisingly taking some cues from the old guard. The e-commerce giant’s first print toy catalog started making its way to shoppers’ mailboxes this week. Yes, ...

Telecom Italia SpA’s headquarters sits about 200 meters from the Porta Salaria, the city gate through which salt arrived in ancient Rome from the Adriatic coast. Some of that salt is being rubbed into the wounds of the aggrieved Italian carrier, which announced a 2 billion-euro impairment on the value of its home operations, partly a consequence of new competition ...

What does strongman showmanship look like? In India, it’s 25,000 tons of steel, 3,550 tons of bronze and 210,000 cubic meters of cement and concrete — towering over the world at a cost of about $400 million. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently unveiled the Statue of Unity in his home state of Gujarat. The likeness is of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, ...

There are no more sensitive topics in British politics than Brexit, tax avoidance and Russian interference. A Molotov cocktail of all three has catapulted businessman Arron Banks to a notoriety he could only have dreamt of when he started his campaign to leave the European Union (EU). Last week Banks’s campaign group and his company Eldon were fined for breaking ...

New-age financiers: Looking to do some good while earning a 51 percent yield? Indonesia’s the place. The nation of 260 million people is the perfect venue for fintech startups, from digital-credit-card providers to peer-to-peer lenders. Only half the over-15 population has bank accounts, while a paltry 2 percent hold credit cards. Traditional banks aren’t keen to enter the “subprime” consumer ...

After years of rumours and speculation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd finally presented a smartphone with a foldable display that it plans to start selling next year. At the risk of sounding like a wide-eyed teenager, I consider this a potentially disruptive innovation on the scale of the iPhone—if the manufacturers can handle it right. The technology has been more or ...

Bloomberg Europe’s fault lines were on full display at the weekend as France and Germany made a show of unity at a World War I commemoration in Paris and Poland’s leaders marched through Warsaw with far-right groups. Police estimated more than 200,000 people converged on the Polish capital on Sunday to mark the centenary of the country’s hard-fought independence in ...