Opinion

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund has been described as a “big stack bully” because of its ability to throw money around at the poker table of venture capital funding. The fund doesn’t appear to have done any net new deals in the September quarter. According to data in its fiscal first-half filing, the fund had investments totaling $28.1 billion on ...

If Haruhiko Kuroda is starting to lay the groundwork to trim Japan’s huge stimulus, he’ll be looking over his shoulder at two things: the world outside and a deceased predecessor. The first issue for the Bank of Japan (BOJ) governor to watch is the international scene, which is getting tougher for central banks eyeing steps away from ultra-accommodation. Kuroda’s speech ...

Americans are not the only ones still unpacking the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade deal that is due to replace Nafta. Two issues have received a great deal of attention in Canada — one which is misunderstood as a great concession by Canada and the other wrongly celebrated as an unequivocal victory. Both deserve a deeper look. Just recently, Canada’s ...

Money manager Steve Eisman famously predicted the 2007-2008 blowup of the mortgage debt bubble, one of the few to believe that such a “black swan” event was possible. A decade on, the “Big Short” star is back with a bearish bet against two unnamed British banks that he thinks would suffer from a no-deal Brexit. While this is hardly black ...

On my way to a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, I took a little detour to Dearborn, to visit the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation. I wanted to see what a Model T’s gas tank looked like. The importance of the Model T, which the Ford Motor Co. began selling in 1908, is a familiar story. But there ...

The divergence among economies, and the asset-price dispersion that has come with it, remains one of the key global issues for policy makers and investors this year. The phenomenon isn’t sufficiently appreciated, even though it has material impact on benchmark market relationships and leads to feedback loops between financial and economic influences. Yet it will continue to be important, defining ...

Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo got the green light to test its driverless vehicles in California, an expansion of the program currently underway in Arizona. Waymo’s minivans will be driving in a swath of Silicon Valley around its headquarters, an area the company says it knows well. If — or when — Waymo and other driverless-car operators expand into denser urban ...

Credit Suisse Group AG CEO Tidjane Thiam likes to be clear about what he can and can’t control as he tries to turn around the Swiss bank. While he has been able to contain risk, slash costs and raise capital, top-line revenue is out of his hands, he told Bloomberg Television. The not-so-small catch for investors: Revenue is exactly where ...

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about the re-emergence of undemocratic regimes around the world and the collapse of the US-led global order established after the Cold War. The data in the Global Wealth Reports, published annually by Credit Suisse, could provide a clue to some of the economic dynamics underlying these trends. The reports track ...

China’s decision to reverse a 25-year-old ban and allow trade, in ‘special cases,’ in products made from critically endangered tigers and rhinos provoked a predictable firestorm of criticism. China has sought to portray the move as a responsible way to regulate such goods: The goal is to produce a steady supply of things like rhino horns — used in traditional ...