Opinion

During the past four decades, the US has become much more racially and ethnically diverse. The share of non-Hispanic white people residing in the country is now only 62 percent, while Hispanics and Asians together make up 22.5 percent. Since 2014, less than half of the kids born in the US have been born to two non-Hispanic white parents. Some ...

The answer to one of Mario Draghi’s problems lies in a dusty corner of a basement gym. Though the European Central Bank is ending new net bond purchases through quantitative easing, its sti-mulus packages are still very much under discussion. One issue concerns the maturities it will target when it reinvests its substantial slug of maturing debt and coupon payments ...

Investors appear to be losing faith in an economy that does not yet appear to be losing steam. For the first time since late 2015, cyclical stocks are all of a sudden the market’s biggest losers. The Vanda Cyclicals-Defensives US in-dex, which as the name suggests measures the relative performance of cyclical stocks against defensive ones, is down 7 percent ...

A sledgehammer to swat a fly. That’s how OCBC Investment Research is describing the unexpected curbs on Singapore’s property market announced. While the imposition of additional buyers’ stamp duties and tighter loan-to-value norms on home lending so early in the cycle does indeed smack of overkill (especially after a less than 10 percent recovery in residential prices following a long ...

If bond traders still questioned whether Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve would truly stay the course, no matter how choppy the waters, minutes of the central bank’s June meeting should erase all doubt. Fed officials said they realised the Treasury yield curve was rapidly heading toward inversion, according to the Federal Open Market Committee minutes. Many saw downside risks from emerging ...

Samsung Group is showing how corporate governance reform in South Korea — despite what had seemed some initial momentum — will be like pulling teeth. Samsung Life Insurance Co is under pressure to sell its stake in Samsung Electronics Co, a holding that’s key to the Lee family’s control of the smartphone and semiconductor giant, Bloomberg News had reported. The ...

A trade war can be fought on many fronts. As China breeds unicorns, they are being asked to stay at home rather than gallop overseas to enrich US investors. The US pipeline of Chinese IPOs has been light since President Donald Trump started making noises about tariffs in early March. The only billion-dollar offering is the pending sale by e-commerce ...

The latest biotech investment craze runs on excitement over Crispr, a technique for making gene editing easier and more precise, which biologists have already used to remove disease-causing genes from human embryos and slow the growth of cancer cells. Although a study published last month raised the possibility that the technology might also cause cancer in human cells, experts think ...

Donald Trump is trying to take on the single most globalised industry — and China. But the world’s largest car market won’t budge. Beijing reduced duties on autos on July 1, just before the imposition of US tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods. China’s carmakers, like its consumers, are the least vulnerable to exte- rnal forces compared with counterparts ...

A big Asian player has been left out of a flurry of media and entertainment mergers. Japan’s Sony Pictures, a key unit of the revitalised Sony Corp, is unlikely to be sold under Kenichiro Yoshida. But the new CEO will owe shareholders an explanation if dealmaking heats up. As Comcast Corp looks to beat Walt Disney Co’s $71.3 billion offer ...