Opinion

Glencore Plc’s announcement of a $1 billion stock buyback was short on both wit and colour. So allow me to hazard a rough translation: “Don’t worry, we’re rich and our share price should be much higher.” Faced with the unwelcome attention of the US Department of Justice, most companies would be inclined to batten down the hatches. But, just a ...

Japanese acquirers aren’t known for underpaying. So the country’s top industrial-gas producer looks to have lucked out in buying the European cast-offs of the $45 billion merger between Germany’s Linde AG and Praxair Inc of the US. Praxair agreed to sell assets valued at about 5 billion euros ($5.9 billion) to Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp as part of efforts to ...

Wall Street is booming. Mergers and acquisitions are happening at a record pace this year. Initial public offerings are making a comeback. Volatility — the lifeblood of any good trader — is creeping back into markets. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in March that Wall Street’s average bonus jumped 17 percent in 2017 to $184,220, the highest since ...

As our appetite for data booms, private equity firms are betting on the cell towers and cable infrastructure to support it. The prize looks to be in creating the pan-European giant that has so far eluded the region’s telecoms industry. For years, Europe’s carriers have struggled to consolidate across the continent in the same way as their US counterparts. But ...

Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and one of the pioneers of the world wide web, once declared: The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Andreessen has since repudiated this declaration, and taken a more optimistic stance. But economists, ...

If Donald Trump had his way, the US wouldn’t import any German cars at all. “Build them here!” he barked in a recent tweet threatening 20 percent tariffs on European automakers. No matter that the Germans have invested billions of dollars in US plants and their employees build hundreds of thousands of cars in the country annually, many of them ...

Global worries over trade wars, central bank rate hikes and geopolitical instability have hammered emerging-market debt in recent months. The fact is, over the past decade, many developing and low-income countries have simply borrowed too much. They borrowed from the markets, from banks and from other countries. In particular, they borrowed from China, which has averaged more than $100 billion ...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proved once again she is the ultimate political survivor. As the immediate threat of a collapse of her government coalition passes, so does one source of some of downward pressure on the euro. That pressure has been pretty substantial over the past two months, and the blowup in Italian politics in mid-April was just a ...

So much for the trade war apocalypse. While many headlines feature gloom about the precarious state of relations between the US and its economic partners, Japan’s most widely watched indicator has some sunny patches worthy of attention. Japanese companies plan a surge in capital spending in the year through March 2019, according to the central bank’s quarterly Tankan survey released ...

It’s time for investors to stop fighting the last war. The next downturn most likely won’t be triggered by another meltdown of the financial system. The Federal Reserve has concluded its stress test of big banks, a look into whether they have enough money set aside to withstand another 2008-type financial crisis. The Fed announced that all 35 banks examined ...