When Narendra Modi took office as India’s prime minister just over four years ago, a top priority for the economic reformers who had supported his candidacy was the privatization of India’s incredibly inefficient public sector. Among their biggest targets was the state-run airline, Air India — a clunky, loss-making behemoth that has long been rendered irrelevant by buzzy domestic competitors. ...

Imagine you run a hotel group that’s just sold a controlling stake in its property portfolio so it can pursue a fashionable “asset-light” strategy. What’s the most logical way to deploy some of the 4.6 billion euros ($5.4 billion) of capital released by that transaction to maximize investor returns? Maybe not buying a chunky stake in a strike-prone, heavily indebted, ...

It doesn’t feel all that long ago that Australian banks were the envy of the world. In March 2009, when stress-testing of US financial institutions drove the final spasm of the previous year’s credit crisis, you could have bought all the shares in Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Barclays Plc with their $8.4 trillion of gross ...