Opinion

It’s taken decades but finally, Japan’s doors are swinging open for private equity. The country’s corporate giants have long been a coveted target for buyout firms seeking to put large pools of capital to work. Money, though, hasn’t been enough to overcome the traditional Japanese hostility to takeovers. Until recently, that is. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s exhortations for improved corporate ...

California’s energy future is visible in the underground garage of a luxury condominium that rises behind the façade of a former San Francisco muffler shop. The parking spaces come equipped with charging stations for electric cars — an amenity that, as of next year, the city will require. The city law, which mandates that at least 10 percent of parking ...

Tencent Holdings Ltd’s rise into a $500 billion company was fuelled by a culture of internal competition, where teams raced against each other to make ideas work. To become an advertising powerhouse like Facebook Inc., the internal barriers are starting to come down. The seven main business units of China’s largest company are working to synchronize data and study a ...

Since the recession ended in mid-2009, the US economy has averaged annualized growth of just 2.2 percent, and the Bloomberg consensus forecast does not expect it to grow much faster in the year ahead. Estimates of real growth are just 2.4 percent in 2018. Some forecasters assume a stronger expansion as a result of the Trump administration tax legislation. Our ...

It’s getting tougher and tougher to keep track of all the different versions of bitcoin. New iterations of the cryptocurrency are multiplying as disagreements over bitcoin’s design persist and opportunities for making a quick buck prove hard to pass up. The biggest offshoot, called bitcoin cash, appeared in August after it split from the bitcoin blockchain in a so-called hard ...

By the middle of the century, nuclear-powered Chinese shuttles will regularly ply interplanetary space, carrying workers between mining colonies on distant planets and asteroids. If that, like much else published on the front page of the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, sounds like propaganda, remember that China has in barely two decades built up what’s arguably ...

It took just 24 hours for politics and optics to trump economics and common sense. Recently, I suggested that India was striking the right balance by preventing only “wilful” defaulters from bidding for their own assets in bankruptcies. Since with most of the country’s $207 billion of impaired loans, there’s no proof of malfeasance by the controlling shareholders—or promoters as ...

Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing the right alternative commodity-linked currency to pay for their groceries. First we got the Bitcoin Visa card, the perfect gift for those who want an easy way spend a cryptocurrency that has gained 800 percent this year on goods whose price is up a relatively mild 3 percent. Swipe the ...

South Korea’s corporate watchdog is going after charities that the nation’s family dynasties may have been using to skirt power-diluting inheritance taxes and maintain control, according to a Bloomberg News report. That’s a smart move, but an incomplete one. For the crackdown on the $12 billion in foundation money held by chaebol including Samsung Group and Hyundai Motor Group to ...

After years of crisis management, heightened self-doubt and even existential threats, Europe is in a much better place. Economic growth is picking up, political uncertainty has diminished and, despite (if not partially because of) Brexit, the vision of an “ever-closer” regional union is energizing some new constructive thinking in core countries. Translating this into sustainable prosperity, however, is far from ...