Opinion

Indian bankruptcies get a dose of karma, Uncle Sam style

India’s fledgling bankruptcy regime is turning both karmic and American. Eat, pray, love; applaud the shift. The government tweaked the 2016 insolvency law on Wednesday to disallow managements that have been “willful defaulters” from bidding for their own assets. That weird term has been defined by the central bank as instances where borrower firms didn’t repay while having the capacity ...

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Justice has a case on AT&T/Time Warner

The Justice Department’s new head of antitrust enforcement, Makan Delrahim, is getting plenty of grief for his surprise decision to challenge merger of AT&T and Time Warner. He’s been accused of stretching law “beyond the breaking point,” and of helping President Donald Trump act on his long-running grudge against Time Warner’s flagship news network, CNN. Actually, Justice is to be ...

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The stock market might actually be right

The idea that prices in financial markets reflect all available information — also known as the efficient markets hypothesis — has many variations: Some adherents think the process is immediate and precise, while others think it’s much messier, with prices often missing true value by a significant margin. New research suggests that the latter version fits the data better — ...

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China’s quest for clean air is shaking up industry, inflation

The great Chinese environmental cleanup, now in full swing, is shifting the corporate landscape in unexpected ways and even stoking inflationary pressure that may soon be felt in supply chains worldwide. As President Xi Jinping’s government intensifies the fight against the country’s world-class pollution problem, companies are scrambling to adapt to tighter regulation while investing in cleaner energy. In industries ...

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The Beautiful 50 fly close to the sun

China’s largest blue chips are flying high.There’s been a seismic shift in the notoriously speculative $8.7 trillion stock market. Large-cap blue-chip companies are the new darlings, a reversal from the smaller growth stocks previously in favor. The Beautiful 50, a local term for the 50 most influential companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, returned 33 percent this year. The Shenzhen ...

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Google is filtering news for the wrong reason

We’ve known for a long time that Google makes content decisions, but recent moves in the direction of censorship are going too far. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a regulatory backlash given Google’s victims: websites that no mainstream politician will defend. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told a conference on Monday the company was working ...

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China’s top economic risk may be education

Chinese President Xi Jinping recently laid out a bold vision for transforming his country into a fully developed economy by 2050, with a particular emphasis on spurring innovation and technology. Given China’s current level of human capital — and some looming changes in the world economy — that may be harder than he expects. A widely held view in the ...

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Facebook looks in mirror and sees Tencent staring back

Facebook and China’s Tencent are entrenched among the global technology elite, and they are more alike than at first glance. Yes, the two companies are quite different businesses. Facebook Inc. makes nearly all of its $36 billion in annual revenue from selling advertising to companies eager to reach the 2 billion people who use its internet hangouts each month. Tencent ...

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A compromise on net neutrality is still possible

Are you ready for another thrilling fight over network neutrality? It’s coming. Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to dismantle rules put in place in 2015 that require internet service providers to treat all content travelling through their pipes equally. The rules prohibit the ISPs from blocking or “throttling” certain web traffic, and from offering “fast ...

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Britain’s budget is an impossible balancing act

Pity Philip Hammond, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer. His budget announcement yesterday has to contend not just with the long-term fiscal implications of sluggish growth in productivity — a nagging issue for the British economy — but also with the government’s lack of a parliamentary majority and the enormous uncertainty surrounding Brexit. These conditions demand an exacting balance of ...

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