Opinion

Bets on the world’s biggest car companies look a bit less safe as the US market confronts slowing sales, an obsession with trucks and ballooning numbers of used cars. Bonds of captive auto-finance companies like Ford Motor Credit Co., Toyota Motor Credit Corp., General Motors Financial Co. and Daimler AG’s financing subsidiary have been trading more like their parents in ...

Fortis Healthcare Ltd. has to admit a new owner to keep the lights on. Before it does, though, India’s second-largest hospital chain must write four of its board members a discharge slip. The country’s serious fraud office and the stock-market regulator are investigating Fortis even as it tries to sell itself to one of five serious suitors, which include Malaysian, ...

Think the plummeting costs of solar and wind are transforming the energy landscape? Then you should be betting on ways to warehouse that power. To understand why, consider: Unlike almost all their rivals in the energy-generation space, solar panels and wind turbines are mass-produced goods. That means they’re subject to the rules of continual improvement and falling costs that we ...

It’s Groundhog Day again for the euro. It doesn’t really matter whether talks in Italy between the Five Star Movement and the League still include plans to seek a write-off of 250 billion euros ($295 billion) of the nation’s debts and secure an exit mechanism from the euro, as the Huffington Post reported. The fact that these ideas were even ...

Call it full circle. Five years after the 2013 taper tantrum, Indonesia is looking fragile again. This year, foreigners have been selling anything to do with the Southeast Asian nation. The Jakarta Composite Index is down 7.4 percent, making Indonesia, along with the Philippines, one of the worst-performing emerging markets in the region. The rupiah has tumbled 3.6 against the ...

Pop quiz: Which of Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc. has shouted most to investors about Bitcoin or blockchain? The answer is… none of the above. Bloomberg’s database of regulatory filings shows no mention of either blockchain or Bitcoin in these companies’ disclosures since 2008. The closest was Netflix CFO David Wells, who said on ...

My favourite bit in the Wall Street Journal story about Wells Fargo & Co.’s latest regulatory screw-up was this statement from the bank’s public relations department: Over the past several months we’ve built more robust internal processes that reinforce our values, and if we find any situations where behavior violates those values, we take swift action to correct. To which ...

Xiaomi Corp.’s IPO killer just arrived on the scene. China Tower Corp., a telecommunications construction firm that’s owned by the country’s three state operators, is following in the smartphone seller’s footsteps, applying to go public in Hong Kong. The Beijing-based group may raise as much as $10 billion, putting it in the same league as Xiaomi, which is seeking a ...

One year after the election that ushered in the youngest president in French history, Emmanuel Macron isn’t interested in assessments; his reforms, he says, will take a few years to bring results. But one thing is certain: Macron has quietly shelved the best ideas from his campaign and the early days of his administration. The first shelved idea was a ...

US demands that China either open up to increased foreign competition or agree on hard targets for boosting imports overlook the weakness of that nation’s economy. If President Donald Trump’s team doesn’t recognize this fragility and Beijing’s wariness, it overlooks a profound unspoken worry. Few are inclined to think of the Chinese economy as wobbly. According to official data, 2017 ...