Opinion

A plague on all their houses (plus their second homes, and buy-to-let properties)! A report by UK lawmakers on the causes of Carillion Plc’s collapse finds fault with almost everyone involved in Britain’s system of corporate governance. Management, non-executive directors, auditors, advisers and regulators are subjected to varying degrees of opprobrium. The report’s key recommendation – that the government should ...

If Masayoshi Son is to set up another $100 billion Vision Fund, he should use it to tackle Japan’s low birth rate. Not of humans – though it would be great if he could solve that problem. It’s the nation’s position dead last in global entrepreneurship that would be a better cause than pouring money into multibillion-dollar firms. With a ...

Aluminum likes to cherish its image as the green metal. Endlessly recyclable and – in North America and Europe at least – largely manufactured using renewable hydroelectric power rather than the dirty coal used to produce steel and cement, its reputation is so solid that Apple Inc., Alcoa Corp. and Rio Tinto Group are aiming to make it even greener. ...

At the beginning of 1997, Malaysia appeared to be one of the world’s great success stories. Economic growth had topped 9 percent in eight of the previous nine years (and was 8.9 percent in the other one). Foreign investment had been pouring in. The world’s tallest building had just topped off in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and a spectacular new ...

Enron Corp. is long gone, but the scandal it left behind in India has beguiled the country’s lenders for almost two decades. However, if the bankers who financed the US energy company’s unviable power plant in Maharashtra state aren’t ruing that 2,000-megawatt debacle any more, it’s only because they’re now staring at a mess 20 times bigger. India’s total electricity-generation ...

The fortunes of iPhone suppliers are looking strong. First-quarter earnings at Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. show that Apple Inc.’s chief product assembler pumped $2 billion more into its supply chain than a year earlier. Weak iPhone sales can’t be blamed for Hon Hai’s net income slipping 15 percent and missing estimates, because they weren’t weak. Revenue at the Taiwanese ...

The sight of J Sainsbury Plc CEO Mike Coupe singing ‘we’re in the money’ neatly sums up the dichotomy between those feeling the pinch from Brexit and those who aren’t. UK corporations have rarely been this flush. They reported record pretax profits in the first quarter, according to the Share Centre, a broker. Average revenue growth for members of the ...

If we could somehow capture all the energy expended on Twitter when California approved new rooftop solar standards, we’d solve our climate problems immediately. The perpetual emotion machine has cranked up in response to the California Energy Commission passing a new building code that will, among other things, require most low-rise residential buildings constructed after 2019 to have built-in solar-power ...

Perhaps Germany’s reputation for penny-pinching is undeserved after all. Net debt at Deutsche Post AG, the mail and logistics operator, swelled by a whopping 10 billion euros ($12 billion) in the first three months of 2018. The bulk of that change of it relates to new accounting rules, rather than new borrowing. But that’s what makes it interesting (bear with ...

In last July, writer and researcher John Rapley penned an article in the British newspaper the Guardian entitled “How Economics Became a Religion.” This followed on the heels of shorter but equally acerbic critiques by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian and Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, earlier that year. In 2015, the Guardian published an article by Joris Luyendijk called ...