Articles sometimes have a long gestation. One that I published this week had its roots in my disagreement with a three-year-old podcast. In this 2016 episode of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert assessed Google’s 2005 acquisition of the startup behind the Android operating system for smartphones. Rosenthal and Gilbert had a sensible view that Android was a ...

It’s time for investors to fight the Fed. A popular Wall Street saw is that the Federal Reserve has a heavy hand in the level of the stock market. The theory is that low interest rates buoy stocks and that high rates sink them, so by controlling interest rates the Fed controls the market indirectly. From that nugget springs the ...

Bloomberg American equity-index futures slumped alongside stocks in Europe as weak data from two of the world’s biggest economies overshadowed an apparent de-escalation in the trade war. Treasuries and European bonds rallied, with key parts of both the US and UK yield curves inverting. Contracts on the S&P 500 fell alongside the Stoxx Europe 600 index as data showed Germany’s ...