Opinion

A number of hedge fund firms have a hot product. It’s not their hedge funds. Och-Ziff Capital Management’s investors withdrew $418 million from its hedge funds in the second quarter. Total inflow of assets under management, however, were $1.2 billion, its largest increase in assets in four years. The firm’s hot product: Collateralised loan obligations — a derivative debt investment ...

The trade dispute with the US hangs like an ax over China’s economy, but for the country’s real estate developers, it’s a boon. Onshore funding is opening up and the government is once again smiling on higher prices. Property investors should be doubly relieved: Beijing’s measures to rein in financial risk and cut developers’ access to debt have so far ...

There’s no denying that, since Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017, the US economy has been doing quite well. Growth in real gross domestic product has been steadily accelerating. Strong job growth has also continued, with gains in nonfarm payroll employment even accelerating a little this year, which is pretty remarkable this deep into an economic ...

Pony Ma has been very patient. Unfortunately for him, investors haven’t, and earnings will give them little reason to hold their breath. Net income and revenue at his Tencent Holdings Ltd both missed estimates. Concerns that rising costs would squeeze margins have helped to wipe about $150 billion off the Chinese goliath’s market value since January. Now China’s halt in ...

In the 1981 sci-fi novel “True Names,” Vernor Vinge describes a dystopian future in which hackers go to great lengths to keep their real-world identities secret for fear that the US government might enslave or assassinate them. Almost four decades years later, it’s not lives that are at risk, but reputations and careers. In recent months, we’ve seen multiple media ...

If you are a believer in free markets, you might be tempted to be pleased by some of the more positive policies of the Trump administration: lo-wer corporate tax rates, more market-friendly jud-ges, a greater emphasis on deregulation. Resist (the temptation, if not the administration). When it comes to ideas, the lifeblood of capitalism, the influence of President Donald Trump ...

India’s state is a mirror of its noisy, messy democracy. It’s often hard to achieve even a modest internal consensus between government departments in New Delhi: Right now, the heads of several ministries are scrambling to find a common position on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP — a giant trade deal that stitches together India, the Association of ...

Forty-five years ago, Congress passed the US Endangered Species Act — quietly, near-unanimously and with no concern that any American would ever object. Everyone wanted to avoid the extinction of wildlife, to save the likes of the California condor, the Florida panther and the North Atlantic right whale for their “esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the ...

For US bond investors, the summer hiatus from Federal Reserve speakers couldn’t have come at a better time. Since the central bank left interest rates unchanged on Aug. 1, only two officials have made public comments: Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin on Aug. 8 and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans on August 9. None are scheduled to talk again until ...

It should have been a good day for the euro after Eurostat said the euro-area economy grew faster in the second quarter than initially reported. But instead, the Bloomberg Euro Index that measures the shared currency against its major peers fell the most in two months, dropping as much as 0.92 percent. The seemingly illogical response by foreign-exchange traders becomes ...