Opinion

For investors in Vietnam, discretion is increasingly the better part of valor. You won’t see any sign of caution in the current IPO frenzy, though. Far from slowing down, Southeast Asia’s busiest market for stock offerings over the past year seems to be revving up. GIC Pte, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, is spending about $850 million for a 7.1 percent ...

The world’s rich countries face a looming challenge in education: Too many of their citizens lack the skills and credentials needed for the jobs of the future. To keep people productively engaged in work in the coming decades, and to ensure that economies maintain robust growth, governments, educators and employers will need to make lasting investments in a new class ...

Last week, the European Parliament backed the idea of breaking up Google. It doesn’t have the power to do it, but the legislators’ decision is a notable part of a backlash against the remedial action Google took after the European Commission fined it $2.95 billion for abusing its dominant position in shopping search. That backlash can lead to dire consequences ...

Just when shoppers are putting more jars of coffee and bottles of shampoo into their baskets, there’s another worry for the big consumer goods groups: they don’t want to pay more for them. Last week both Nestle SA and Unilever NV announced a return to volume growth in the first quarter of their financial years — and pricing that was ...

Policymakers from some 180 countries wrapped up the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington on Sunday with a warning: Take steps now, while the global economy is still strengthening, to head off escalating risks of instability looming just over the horizon. The message was reminiscent of the “yes, but” theme that dominated the same ...

Sitting at the controls of a Boeing space-flight simulator, ‘docking’ the company’s planned ‘Starliner’ craft with an imaginary space station, you begin to understand why the Pentagon is so focused on such advanced systems. Space is the new frontier of warfare. That was the theme of a ‘Space Symposium’ in Colorado Springs that gathered thousands of military and corporate experts ...

M&A shouldn’t be this easy. London-listed drugmaker Shire Plc has nudged Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. to up its takeover proposal twice to 44 billion pounds ($62.5 billion). Allergan Plc said that it was considering a bid only to say it wouldn’t after its shares suffered a bad reaction. This auction may have a bit further to go. Takeda must have ...

The pound’s slow but steady gains in the past year or so have seen it recover almost all of its post-Brexit referendum losses against the dollar. But in a welcome sign that monetary policy remains data-dependent rather than driven by what might be called fear of missing out, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney may have just halted its ascent. ...

President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion of tax cuts have to be funded somehow. Step forward ever more US Treasury bills and notes. As the bulk of the new supply is coming at five-year maturities or less, that’s having a pronounced effect on the US yield curve. And markets on the other side of the world are starting to feel it. ...

Last Sunday, 13,000 people took to the streets of Berlin carrying signs like ‘Renters Aren’t Lemons.’ Despite Germany’s tenant-friendly laws, a tide of gentrification is gradually turning Berlin from the ‘poor’ capital of cool into another generic hipsterville. The city calls it ‘rent madness.’ The smallest increase in rents between 2007 and 2016 was 34 percent in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, an area ...