Opinion

The Brexit-battered pound jumped for joy when European Union (EU) trade negotiator Michel Barnier told an audience in Slovenia that a finalized divorce agreement between the UK and the EU is ‘realistic’ in six to eight weeks. That doesn’t mean that we can all exhale by November. The divorce deal – which dictates the amount the UK will pay into ...

It’s lucky for airline executives that they’re a well-paid bunch, because when things go wrong the job’s a living nightmare. Besides the ever-present, low-level risk of a tragic accident, the complexity and customer-facing nature of aviation means that any operational snafu can become a crisis that dominates news coverage for days. Alex Cruz knows this only too well. Since being ...

As bad as the 2008 crisis was, the cure could be worse. After Lehman Brothers fell and the US government stepped in to rescue finance from its worst instincts, many demanded that banking become “boring” again. Stolid lending, it was argued, was what banking should be all about. It’s time to recognize that this was a mistake. Finance is indeed ...

President Donald Trump has gone so far as to suggest that he possesses “a magic wand” capable of producing unexpectedly robust economic growth. I don’t know about a magic wand. But Trump is right about the strong economy: This is a genuine boom. And the greatest threat to it is the president’s policy agenda. First, give credit where it is ...

India has a long history of drafting laws to protect its companies. In the process, Indians themselves often suffer. That’s precisely what will happen if the government proceeds with plans to force companies doing business in India to store all customer data locally. The first salvo in this campaign was fired in April, when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ...

Let European banks merge – in the name of the resistance. That was the unspoken message from former Deutsche Bank AG CEO Josef Ackermann, who told Bloomberg Television that US banks’ global dominance in the era of Donald Trump should stir Europe’s banks into joining forces and gaining scale. He urged regulators to help. As if on cue, more names ...

Convinced of an existential threat from competitors, America is weaponizing the dollar to preserve its global economic and geopolitical position. While the US accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s economic output, more than half of all global currency reserves and trade is in dollars. This is the result of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, the effect of which ...

President Donald Trump claimed to have a “magic wand” that allowed him to push the economy’s growth rate above an annual rate of 4 percent in 2018’s second quarter. This is one of the president’s more colorful public statements taking credit for the economy’s performance. Such statements are as common as they are overstated. Trump isn’t alone in exaggerating the ...

India is marking the 10th anniversary of the 2008 global financial crisis with its own mini-Lehman moment. True to script, ratings companies have belatedly realised that the IL&FS Group — Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. and its associates — is woefully short of liquidity, with about $500 million in repayments coming due in the second half of its fiscal ...

It’s rare to see a deal suffering a price cut after it’s been signed – even rarer when there’s a big equity fundraising on the side. Last week, private equity firm Advent International Plc agreed a maximum 17 percent snip to the price of Mondo Minerals BV, the Dutch talc producer it agreed to sell to British chemicals group Elementis ...