Opinion

  Andy Mukherjee What a difference a year makes, especially when it comes with hundreds of million of dollars in unexpected cash prizes. At the start of 2016, Vedanta Resources Plc’s 2019 dollar bonds were trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar. Now, they’re well above par. Founder and Chairman Anil Agarwal is celebrating by launching a debt-funded ...

  The House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday marked the end of the opening installment of ‘The President,’ the must-watch reality/horror show that has transfixed the nation and the world. Now the plotline gets more serious, perhaps darker, with some new characters likely to emerge in key national-security roles. President Trump should be less of a stage hog going forward, ...

  Being boring has put billionaire Li Ka-shing in a higher-risk position. Li, who earned the moniker Superman for his canny investing, has spent years building an empire that’s almost like a trust. CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. and Cheung Kong Property Holdings Ltd., which reported full-year results Wednesday, get most of their earnings from staid but stable assets such as ...

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent victory in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and politically important state, seemed a welcome affirmation of his pro-development message. It’s now at risk of becoming a triumph for narrow-mindedness. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party didn’t name a candidate for chief minister during the Uttar Pradesh campaign, instead making the vote a referendum on the popularity ...

  The Russian hacking scandal, which has dogged Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, refuses to die down. Despite National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s fall from grace for lying about conversation with Russian envoy and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ acceptance that he had misled senators about his meetings with Kremlin envoy, Trump continues to be in denial mode about ...

  The end of Iceland’s nine years of capital controls is an occasion to celebrate for Icelandic businesses — and for those economists who, like Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, touted Iceland’s post-crisis recovery as an example of how it should be done. Yet even after almost a decade, Iceland may still need a relatively closed financial market for that ...

  European companies are rushing to sell bonds in dollars. After all, that’s where the investors are. So far this year, dollar-denominated syndicated new bond sales have exceeded $475 billion, a record for any quarter. A surprising amount — about 22 percent — has come from European issuers. Within this, about $81 billion is from euro-area companies, including banks, according ...

  In the dusty scrub of the Thar desert, Pakistan has begun to dig up one of the world’s largest deposits of low-grade, brown, dirty coal to fuel new power stations that could revolutionize the country’s economy. The project is one of the most expensive among an array of ambitious energy developments that China is helping the country to build ...

  Mend it, don’t end it’ was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to ‘repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Obamacare) look increasingly like ‘mend it, don’t end it.’ The problem is not that, as is frequently said, no entitlement can be ended. The most consequential legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, repealed ...

  Among financial geeks, the repurchase market is seen as the lifeblood of a monetary system. Without it, banks can’t really operate. China’s seized up, prompting the People’s Bank to perform an emergency cardiac massage. Other regulators in Beijing may want to look on closely, because they may be called upon to undertake a similar maneuver shortly. To understand what ...