Opinion

A funny thing happened after Amazon invited cities to compete for its second North American headquarters. Somehow other corporations got the idea that they would be the winners. There’s been a disturbing trend in corporations seeing the tax breaks offered to Amazon and deciding they’re entitled to the same when they pursue their own expansions or relocations. There’s nothing inherently ...

This week at the Bloomberg Ideas conference in San Francisco I had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of smart, friendly artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Being the Gadfly that I am, I figured it would be a great chance to ask what, to my mind, was an incisive question. Is China or the US better at artificial intelligence? Turns out, ...

Central bankers devote a huge amount of time and resources to communicating with markets, companies and the public. So why do the Bank of England’s (BOE) communications still end up confusing markets and distorting decisions in the real economy? The BOE’s latest inflation report marked a new low on the communication front. The bank explains how the outlook for interest ...

Last week, the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) announced new rules on how banks should treat dud loans. The good news is that the changes will help make European banks more resilient in the future. The bad news is that the euro zone banking system remains insufficiently equipped to deal with a new crisis. European banks are ...

Kumar Mangalam Birla just treated India’s new bankruptcy law with utter disdain. But before you dismiss this as yet another instance of a billionaire behaving badly, think of the huge favour he’s doing the legal system. Normally, Birla’s 72.7 billion rupee ($1.1 billion) offer to Binani Industries Ltd. for its 98.4 percent stake in Binani Cement would be unremarkable. Birla’s ...

Without a doubt, the European Central Bank is the euro zone’s most powerful policy-making institution: It sets monetary policy for 19 member states and supervises the bloc’s most important lenders. Even so, the failure of a Latvian bank shows that the ECB doesn’t have all the powers it needs. Gaps remain, and they put Europe’s financial system at risk. At ...

Presume not that China is the thing it was. That’s certainly the message Premier Li Keqiang intends to convey with his promise to cut levies on imports. Almost simultaneously, Bloomberg News reported that the Trump administration will impose tariffs on as much as $60 billion of Chinese products as soon as this week. Have the world’s great protectionist and its ...

It’s now safe to say that the US economy is in a boom. Small business leaders are saying it. Measures of business optimism, tracked by the National Federation of Independent Business, are at all-time highs. These heady survey measures haven’t yet been matched by hard data, but the hard numbers are looking good too. Business investment as a percent of ...

Imagine a world in which the Japanese currency strengthens past the psychologically important level of 100 yen per dollar. It wouldn’t be so bad. With Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s approval rating edging toward July’s low, traders are doing a U-turn on their yen bets. Hedge funds are now in favour of a stronger Japanese currency for the first time since ...

Take note of this moment. This is a tipping point for online grocery shopping in the US. Food and beverage retail is one of the largest categories of consumer spending, accounting for yearly sales of $800 billion or more in the US. And it has been stubbornly immune to e-commerce. Last year, Kantar Worldpanel estimated online shopping for groceries and ...