Opinion

  These are the world’s five largest technology companies, ranked by revenue: How about that Hon Hai!?! The full name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., but you probably know it as Foxconn, the main name it does business under. It’s the Taiwan-based contract manufacturer with hundreds of thousands of employees in mainland China, several of whom probably put your ...

  Rules are there to be broken — and that’s official. Spain and Portugal have just escaped punishment for breaking the European Union’s budget-deficit limits. In the EU, such lapses without consequences are not exactly uncommon. In the case of the budget rules, that’s a good thing, because the rules are widely acknowledged to be no good. But here’s a ...

  International Monetary Fund had predicted that China’s economy would grow by 6.6% in 2016. And the economists polled by Reuters had anticipated a growth rate of 6.6 percent. But China’s economy narrowly beat estimates with a 6.7 percent expansion on-year in the three months through June, as a string of stimulus measures from the government and the central bank ...

  A top Bavarian domestic intelligence official has made tabloid headlines by saying there are “hit squads” and “sleeper cells” among the refugees who have recently arrived in Germany — something right-wing populists have been maintaining all along. Yet the true “sleeper cells” have been here for decades, and that explains why, as Germany and other European countries step up ...

  Nir Kaissar There’s a strange disconnect today between some investors’ trepidation about US stocks and the soothing signals coming from the equity market. As my Bloomberg colleague Barry Ritholtz recently noted, a whole bunch of high-profile money mavens — Stan Druckenmiller, George Soros and Bill Gross included — are kvetching about the dangers lurking in U.S. shares (among other ...

  Max Nisen Disappointing earnings. Substantially lower guidance for 2016. A CFO departure. A suspended dividend. A drug-pricing controversy. Oh, and a libel suit against a chicken farmer. All were features of Concordia International’s unusually calamitous earnings report on Friday. For a day, at least, the Ontario-based specialty pharma firm one-upped its better-known progenitor Valeant, which has had a mixed ...

  Seated in his office here, wearing neither a necktie nor a frown, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is remarkably relaxed for someone at the epicenter of a crisis now in its second year and with no end in sight. But, then, stress is pointless when the situation is hopeless. Besides, if you can ignore the fact that self-government is failing ...

  Brazil, it is often and not quite fairly said, is the country of the future and always will be. As the Olympics focuses global attention on the country, it’s worth exploring the various ways in which this maxim is — and may not be — true. The puzzle with Brazil is neither its successes nor its failures, but rather ...

  Macy’s incoming CEO is starting off strong. He’ll need to get stronger. The department store said it would close 100 stores, or 14 percent of the 728 stores it currently operates. (Not included in the closings are the 100 or so Bloomingdales and Blue Mercury stores it also owns.) This announcement marks a sizable acceleration in store closings — ...

  As the world reels under economic unpredictability and the market volatility grows, wisdom lies in tapping the benefits of Islamic economy. The Islamic bonds (sukuks) issued by UAE banks are being ranked as one of the world’s best-performing instruments. We will see rapid expansion of Islamic finance as more and more customers are added to the already huge and ...