Opinion

To Switzerland, and a beautifully engineered corporate U-turn. Zurich-based industrial group ABB Ltd. is considering a sale of its power grids business, according to Bloomberg News. The deliberations come nearly two years after CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer ardently rejected calls from activist Cevian Capital AB for the unit be separated. Perhaps he realises the justifications for keeping it are dwindling. The ...

There is a curiously retro aspect to the energy policies of the Trump administration, with its embrace of resource nationalism and love of extraction over efficiency. Coal, so redolent of the age of Bismarck, is its touchstone. And while the latest attempt to make coal competitive again, the Affordable Clean Energy proposal, is quite obviously not going to do much ...

Corporate banking in India is one of those painful-to-watch soccer games stretching goallessly into injury time. Neither the creditors nor the debtors have the energy to carry on, yet they’re dreading the long whistle: That’s when both sides lose. The match was supposed to end, going by the 180-day deadline the Indian banking referee gave lenders on March 1 to ...

Moody’s Investors Service published an in-depth look at US leveraged loans. And it seems the more the analysts dug in, the more alarmed they became. Yes, the nearly $1.4 trillion market can take comfort in a low 3.4 percent default rate that Moody’s projects will only get lower, most likely dropping to 2.2 percent over the next year. But that’s ...

Who lost Lehman Brothers? Could it have been saved? As we approach the 10th anniversary of Lehman’s collapse (September 15), these questions won’t go away. The Lehman bankruptcy is portrayed as the pivotal event that converted severe — but familiar — disruptions in financial markets into a full-blown panic. Nothing like it had occurred in the United States since the ...

September in the European corporate debt market is often a time of much rejoicing. The dearth of activity in August is replaced by a flood of issuance, tightening spreads, and a general feeling that bonds are back. Not this time. This August has been particularly miserable, and almost all of the factors that made it that way have every reason ...

With its blistering pace of comparable sales growth in the second quarter, Walmart Inc. threw down the retail gauntlet when it reported earnings last week. Target Corp answered with some impressive results of its own. The big-box retailer reported that comparable sales increased 6.5 percent in the second quarter over a year earlier, its biggest growth on this measure in ...

Over the past decade, a lot of capital has flowed into emerging markets thanks in part to excessive liquidity in advanced economies. This money has often found its way into risky or suspect investment structures. Should a crisis strike — say, contagion from Turkey — investors in these markets will be exposed to risks that they simply aren’t prepared for. ...

With the latest round of trade talks between the US and China ending in a predictable stalemate, one thing has become clear: The Trump administration’s approach to these negotiations has made it all but impossible for Chinese President Xi Jinping to make a deal. Until that changes, there’s no end in sight for the tariff-for-tariff tussle between the two countries, ...

The natural state of a capitalist economy is expansion. Recessions occur when “something breaks” rather than an expansion simply dying of old age. Unfortunately, central banks have a history of pumping the brakes for too long and too hard when attempting to contain growth and inflation and are often the cause of a recession. Given that the Federal Reserve has ...