Bad things don’t happen to good banks. Or that’s the carefully crafted image projected by the world’s priciest lender. Assiduously shielding its loan book from the flying debris of India’s $207 billion bad-debt crisis, HDFC Bank Ltd. has kept its balance sheet in a near-pristine condition. The aura of invincibility bestowed by a 1.26 percent soured-loan ratio — compared with ...

Questions, questions, questions. If there’s one thing that’s tailed China’s Xiaomi Corp. for the past six years, it’s questions. The most recent come as a pair: Will the company IPO next year, and will it fetch the $50 billion it’s supposedly seeking? Last weekend, tech industry newsletter The Information reported that the maker of smartphones and other devices is eyeing ...

Not much time passes these days between so-called major advancements in artificial intelligence. Yet researchers are not much closer than they were decades ago to the big goal: actually replicating human intelligence. That’s the most surprising revelation by a team of eminent scholars who just released the first in what is meant to be a series of annual reports on ...