Opinion

Prepare for the great, but slow, unwinding of a Chinese leviathan. Anbang Insurance Group Co., the bailed-out owner of assets from New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel to Dutch insurer Vivat NV, is sending out mixed messages. The conglomerate hired bankers at UBS Group AG and China International Capital Corp. to advise on potential divestments, Bloomberg News reported; yet the government ...

Big trucks are all the rage in India, but Tata Motors Ltd.’s fortunes are still riding on a luxury marque that isn’t quite built for the subcontinent’s roads. Medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles have been the fastest-growing segment of India’s rapidly expanding auto market, with sales up more than 60 percent in May from a year earlier as transport companies ...

If anything will revive US manufacturing, it’s certainly not an ever-changing package of hastily proposed and canceled tariffs. But as President Donald Trump pursues that non-strategy, it’s worth asking the longer-term questions of whether US manufacturing even needs to be revived at all, and if so, what can accomplish the task. There’s little doubt that the US manufacturing sector has ...

Italy’s new government is one of the most extraordinary democratic experiments tried in western Europe since the Second World War. The Five Star Movement and the League have put together a largely inexperienced ministerial team, which is promising a set of policies that seem impossible to deliver. They face formidable constraints, from Italy’s fragile public finances to EU rules that ...

It will take an Ant to move this Hong Kong stock mountain. Until recently, Hong Kong was an IPO desert. Issuance had been falling for four consecutive years as investors grew weary of deal after deal from state-owned Chinese firms. Then came ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed China Literature Ltd., which both ignited interest with their ...

Like ‘gemutlich’ (a German adjective describing fireside coziness), the Japanese word ‘omotenashi’ is hard to define but easy to picture. It’s a cashier greeting you nicely rather than chatting with colleagues and tossing your purchase across the counter — an all-encompassing focus on service and caring professionalism. Long hailed as the epitome of Japanese quality, the concept is for the ...

Any instance of political turmoil in one of Europe’s bigger economics triggers predictions of the imminent collapse of the European Union or the euro area. The latest prophet of doom is George Soros, who recently proclaimed that “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” for Europe. But at such moments, I’m with James Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive officer, ...

A decade ago, knowing where the oil market was going meant knowing China. Today, the same can be said for electric vehicles — which means it still applies to oil, too. That’s a big takeaway from the latest edition of Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s annual Electric Vehicle Outlook. China isn’t the whole ballgame, but its role in determining the feasibility ...

What is an autonomous car — and more to the point, has Uber Technologies Inc. been operating them at all? From its public statements, you’d certainly think that its vehicles can more or less drive themselves, with humans required only as a safety back-up while the system is in trial mode. The preliminary report released by the US National Transportation ...

Every year, the Federal Reserve conducts a massive survey of American households to paint a portrait of their economic habits and spirits. The recently published findings for 2017 are worth examining for what they say about who should — and shouldn’t — get credit for the resilient US economy. Hint: It’s not who you think. Naturally, President Trump claims paternity. ...