Opinion

What would the ghosts of 1918 — not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward — tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? Ruminations about past and present are inescapable this week. America just finished a snarling, bitterly ...

The $3.2 billion acquisition of Finisar Corp. by II-VI Inc. (pronounced “two-six”) is really about one thing: how much it costs Apple Inc. to build iPhones with Face ID. After the first whispers emerged in 2016 that Apple was considering facial recognition technology for the iPhone, the stocks of 3-D sensor makers surged inside a few months. The story over ...

Not long ago, it was difficult for payments processors to avoid being taken over. Worldpay was sold by Royal Bank of Scotland Plc in the crisis, taken public and bought again in eight years. Nordic payments group Nets went from being owned by a group of banks to private equity ownership, to public markets, before going back into private equity ...

What could the European Central Bank (ECB) realistically do to help Italy, even if it were so minded? Not much, is the depressing answer – in specific new aid anyway. That’s unless Italy ends up getting itself in such a mess that it’s forced to hand over financial control and enter into another ECB bailout program. We’re nowhere near that ...

Reserve Bank of India’s reputation for honesty is a major asset in a country rife with corruption. India’s government and the central bank have had disagreements, but the relationship has never looked so irretrievably broken as it does now. Before the global financial crisis, the finance ministry saw the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as an incompetent regulator, one that ...

A Donald Trump-inspired trade war between the US and China isn’t the reason for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. trimming its optimism. China’s e-commerce giant now sees full-year revenue of 375 billion yuan ($55 billion) to 383 billion yuan, the company announced. That’s 4 percent to 6 percent lower than it had expected previously. But the weakness comes from a competitive ...

In a recent Forbes article, astronomer and writer Ethan Siegel called for a big new particle collider. His reasoning was unusual. Typically, particle colliders are created to test theories — physicists’ math shows that undiscovered particles ought to exist, and experimentalists use colliders to see whether they really do. This was the case with the Large Hadron Collider, which was ...

One lesson of the midterm elections is that economic growth is losing its power to unite the country and to reduce explosive conflicts over race, religion, ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality. This is unfamiliar. Economic progress has been a routine part of our election narratives. The presumption is that a strong economy favours the incumbent party and a weak economy ...

It’s that time of the year when pollution in India’s capital becomes unbearable, courts upset people by restricting Diwali firecrackers, and the environmental authorities threaten draconian steps like banning cars. This is also the season for hand-wringing over the practice of burning crop residue in New Delhi’s neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana, when soot blows towards the city. Scientists ...

Lenovo Group Ltd.’s net income beat analysts’ expectations by $53 million, or 45 percent. While that upside surprise was helped by slightly stronger revenue and a slimmer operating-expense margin – from a reduction in sales and distribution costs – operating income benefited a lot from one-time accounting items. A fall in gross margin by 0.3 percentage points from a year ...