Opinion

Swathes of shuttered stores. Customers slamming their wallets shut. Amazon.com Inc lurking in the background. It doesn’t look like the ideal time for a retailer to go public. But that’s what TheWorks.co.uk Plc is planning to do. It’s a brave decision given the crisis engulfing bricks-and-mortar retailers, but TheWorks is right to press ahead. That’s because the company, which was ...

Xiaomi Corp has caught a lot of breaks from Hong Kong and its stock exchange. China isn’t playing ball. Yet. The Hong Kong-Xiaomi relationship is crucial, and symbiotic. For one, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd ended a ban on dual-class listings that allowed founder Lei Jun to keep control of the smartphone maker and have his IPO too. It ...

That was the high point? We’ve probably seen the best of global growth for this cycle, but the peak wasn’t marked by the traditional catalysts for a slowdown like higher interest rates or a financial blowup. Instead it’s a different scene in each of the biggest economies — with the US powering ahead, Europe and Japan drifting after a stellar ...

You have to give one thing to Facebook Inc: Confronted by a torrent of accusations of misbehaviour over the past 12 months, the world’s largest social network has at least made the effort to be conciliatory. The same cannot be said about Alphabet Inc’s Google. The European Commission will reveal the punishment for the search giant’s practice of forcing smartphone-makers ...

Slowing car sales and tightening credit look like a toxic combination for China’s auto-financing industry, which has exploded in past few years. Concerns the sector is heading for a subprime-like meltdown may be overblown, though. Sales in the world’s largest car market rose 2.3 percent in June from a year earlier, data showed last week. While faster than several analysts ...

The French state has, at times, been as close to a nanny state as it gets. But that doesn’t mean France lacks a thriving charity and non-governmental sector. On the contrary, France’s charity sector is massive, with some 1.3 million estimated non-profit groups. They spend close to 3.4 percent of French GDP, and employ close to 2 million people, with ...

The untold story of the world economy — so far at least — is the potentially explosive interaction between the spreading trade war and the overhang of global debt, estimated at a staggering $247 trillion. That’s “trillion” with a “t.” The numbers are so large as to be almost incomprehensible. Households, businesses and governments borrow on the assumption that they ...

I lost 120 Twitter followers overnight. President Donald Trump lost 340,000, the New York Times 732,000, former President Barack Obama 3 million or so. Even Twitter’s chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, lost 200,000 in his company’s much-hyped crackdown on dubious accounts. But what looks like a major purge is more like a public relations onslaught, as Twitter and Facebook try ...

The world’s biggest bond market just doesn’t know what to do with the prospect of an all-out trade war instigated by the US. On one side, there’s a strong argument that tariffs among the largest economies will stifle the global expansion and push yields in the $15 trillion Treasury market lower. Those concerns are appearing in the price of copper, ...

Many Americans still think of the US economy as increasingly dominated by knowledge and technology workers. In fact, when it comes to jobs growth in this decade, blue-collar industries have outpaced service industries, and the trend is accelerating. Tariffs may amplify this trend — making the US economy more like China’s economic model. Throughout the economic expansion in the 1980s ...