Opinion

It was as a newspaper-office intern in New Delhi in 1992 that I witnessed the birth of India’s homegrown belt-and-road initiative. The program was midwifed by an up-and-coming lender that few had then heard of: Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. (IL&FS). It wasn’t called belt-and-road, a term that would gain currency much later as a catchphrase for China’s opaquely ...

The first stage of this emerging market currency crisis was all about how the problems of individual nations were spilling over into contagion — but without dollar strength as a factor. No longer. A nine-year high for US average hourly earnings in last week’s non-farm payroll report, combined with the strongest reading for the manufacturing PMI index since 2004, have ...

When a company decides to get out of a market by selling off its assets, is that a good sign for the business in question, or a bad one? The answer will weigh on potential buyers of Seaco Srl, the fourth-largest lessor of shipping containers. HNA Group Co., which owns the company via its control of Bohai Capital Holding Co., ...

As the trade war between the US and China drags on with new tariffs and no end in sight, we need to ask ourselves: What do they want? A fundamental objective for both is to become less reliant on the other. The trade war should thus be reframed as a conscious uncoupling. Behind the rhetoric from both sides lies a ...

Ten years after a crisis that brought the world to the brink of Armageddon, the people overseeing the world’s largest economy insist they’ve reduced the risk of another financial disaster. Just one problem: We need a different financial system, not just better risk management. I had a front-row seat for the watershed event of the 2008 crisis, the failure of ...

Everyone remembers where they were a decade ago, right? I’m not talking about the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I mean the Bitcoin white paper of Oct. 31, 2008. It outlined a type of online peer-to-peer electronic cash that would bypass financial institutions — which the author blamed for abusing people’s trust, creating credit bubbles, and charging big fees. Ironically, Bitcoin ...

It didn’t last long. Fintech darling Adyen NV is no longer bigger than Deutsche Bank AG. Shares of the payments startup have fallen 17 percent since a group of its original backers offloaded some their stock well before the end of a lock-up period set at its initial public offering. The disposals are understandable. Adyen’s still-very-expensive valuation is less so. ...

Russia, according to Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Kolychev, is ready to buy back its own domestic debt on the open markets if the US sanctions it or if volatility becomes substantially higher than normal. The idea makes sense if one views foreign bondholders as a source of instability — and that’s how a country like President Vladimir Putin’s Russia should ...

The minute I saw Snap Inc.’s financial statements last year, I couldn’t understand why the company was going public at such a young stage of its development with so short a track record for its corporate strategy. The initial public offering (IPO) for Snapchat’s parent company went well, showing that investors saw Snap as a promising blank state with all ...

Having dominated UK politics for the last two years, you might think that all of the news about Brexit would have led some Brits to change their minds one way or the other. Indeed polls have shown that something like three-quarters of Brits think that their government is handling the UK’s exit from the EU badly. Yet when it comes ...