Opinion

China has smarter places to park money than car garages

  If there’s one message to take away from Asian buyers’ heated interest in French parking lot operator Indigo, it’s that investors remain hungry for yield and assets are scarce. But those steering away from their traditional targets in the hope of infrastructure-like returns from car spaces should be wary. With fewer car parks being built in city centers, parking-lot ...

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How Spotify grew up before going public

  It’s unconscionable in 2017 that the only publicly traded music streaming company is still Pandora Media Inc., an Internet radio provider which went public in 2011 and is trading below its initial public offering price. Hopefully, Spotify Ltd. will rectify the situation this year, even if that means it has to use a back door to an exchange listing. ...

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On Syria, Trump confronts a moral test

  Even for a president who advertised his coldblooded pragmatism, the moral dimensions of leadership find a way of penetrating the Oval Office. In the case of President Trump, the emotional distance seems to have been shattered by simple, indelible images of suffering children in Idlib, Syria. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies! — little babies … ...

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Modi is a different nationalist than Putin or Trump

  Over the past year, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has emerged as the ideological patron of a certain brand of conservatism worldwide. Politicians from France’s Marine Le Pen, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, to Donald Trump appear drawn to Putin’s vision of a world marked by weaker transnational power blocs, fewer meddlesome liberals and a harder line against radical Islam. ...

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Making the Syria strikes count

  In the span of just a few days, US President Donald Trump appears to have met both his first true foreign policy crisis and his most challenging bilateral summit more smoothly than many had feared he might. Whether this turns out to be anything more than a symbolic victory, and whether it has an effect in the fight against ...

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Trump, Xi ice-breaking summit

  North Korea, trade and tariff were among many issues on the table at the much heralded summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping. But Xi visit was overshadowed by US missile strikes on Syrian base in the wake of chemical weapons attack by Assad regime that killed more than 80 civilians, including dozens of children. ...

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How to build China’s latest city of the future

  On April 1, real estate prices in rural Xiongxan County, roughly 80 miles south of Beijing, spiked as much as 37 percent; highways jammed as speculators rushed to the obscure district. That morning, the Chinese government had announced that at the direction of President Xi Jinping, 800 miles surrounding Xiongxan would be developed into a city meant to serve ...

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IPO investors take baton of tech valuation insanity

  Six months ago, technology investors were complaining privately that bankers were lowballing stock prices when companies went public. Fast-forward to today; no one should be griping about overly conservative IPO prices. Late Thursday, business software company Okta Inc. sold 11 million shares in its initial public offering. The IPO values Okta out of the gate at about 13.6 times ...

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Amazon finds there’s nothing foolish in fuel cells

  Victims of tech hype should be a bit wary of Elon Musk’s dismissal of hydrogen fuel cells as “fool cells.” A figure as iconic in the tech industry, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, appears to disagree. Amazon has acquired the right to buy 23 percent of Plug Power, a Latham, New York-based company that went public back in 1999, has ...

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Parliamentary disaster of United States of America

  America’s Congress is quietly becoming a European-style parliament — and the transformation isn’t for the good. Congress is fanning, not defusing, conflict. Although I have written about this before, the issue is worth revisiting, because its significance is underappreciated and it helps explain the brutal bitterness of today’s politics. Witness the acrimonious debate over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch ...

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