Opinion

While this week’s episode of Tesla Inc has left us with several cliffhangers, it did show one thing: just how far the company has veered from Elon Musk’s secret “Master Plan” of 2006. Musk summarised it at the top of an updated version — ”Part Deux” — published in 2016: 1 Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be ...

Public corporations are an odd hybrid institution. They’re not really public in the sense of the government having a stake in them — they’re privately owned companies that follow government standards for financial reporting. In theory, this transparency makes them suitable for the public to invest in. Again in theory, this confers at least two benefits on a company. Financial ...

Go to any Indian airport, and it’ll appear that nearly all of the country’s billion-plus people have decided to fly. Yet talk to shareholders of India’s largest aviation businesses, and they’ll tell you how miserable they are. Oxygen masks have been down since last month’s 97 percent drop in quarterly profit for InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, which operates IndiGo, the budget ...

Suppose a Chinese electric carmaker wants to win market share by selling cars with the best cutting-edge battery technology. How does it get that technology? It can hire some engineers, build a lab and try to develop it inhouse. It can partner with a university research lab to create it. Or alternatively, it can buy an American company that already ...

Calling the turn in industrial cycles isn’t easy. It looks like investors in the beaten-down machinery sector have decided to stop trying. Wade past the impact of the trade war and its potential collateral damage, and conditions are looking up. US bellwether Caterpillar Inc sounded an optimistic note in results, as did its typically cautious Japanese industrial machinery peers, which ...

Ten years on from the financial crisis, bank balance sheets haven’t become any simpler to digest for the average investor. Finance firms are big and leveraged; regulations have just become new instruments of complexity. That might suggest a potential windfall for any brainy number-cruncher who’s bored enough to spend a year looking for inconsistencies in the industry’s accounts. London hedge ...

Elon Musk fired a bazooka in his war against Tesla Inc.’s equity market short-sellers when he announced he’s considering taking the company private. His plan would also most likely wipe out investors who bet the money-losing automaker would eventually default on its bonds. The cost to insure against Tesla failing to make good on its debt fell to an all-time ...

Japan may be just posing as an outlier. Yes, the Bank of Japan renewed its commitment to ultra-low interest rates just as other developed economies were moving towards further rate increases and an end to stimulus. But beneath the headlines about the BOJ’s pledge to keep printing money for an “extended period,” Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and his colleagues left clues ...

Brace, brace. Hong Kong’s IPO takeoff is going to come to a screeching halt. There’s a flood of deals still in the pipeline, it’s true, from food delivery giant Meituan Dianping to biotech unicorn Innovent Biologics Inc. But investor fatigue is setting in, with many of the hot sales that helped to reignite the market in the past year trading ...

The US Treasury Department sold more 10-year notes than it ever had before to help finance a bulging budget deficit. Strategists generally deemed the $26 billion auction “solid.” And although that’s certainly true when comparing the results with recent auctions, it’s hard to ignore an inconvenient truth facing the bond market. Investors submitted bids for 2.55 times the amount offered, ...