After 45 years in business, the underwriter of homes for millions of Indians is moving in with its 28-year-old banker offspring. The joint-family arrangement makes sense for both Housing Development Finance Corp and HDFC Bank Ltd. Mortgages will get more competitive as lenders come under pressure to peg interest rates to benchmarks not in their control, such as the ...

China’s strict Covid-zero policy is getting costlier by day. As the infectious omicron variant spreads, the government is resorting to widespread lockdowns. Shanghai, a city of 25 million people, is at a standstill, and cities accounting for a quarter of China’s gross domestic product are under some form of restrictions on movement, estimates Goldman Sachs Group. Politics is an often-cited ...

  Howard Schultz’s coffee has already gone cold with investors. Just three weeks ago, Starbucks Corp said that the architect of its transformation from boutique coffee house to global juggernaut would return as chief executive officer, sending shares up 5%. They fell by almost as much, after Schultz said he would immediately suspend the group’s share buybacks in order to ...