Believe it or not, I was all ready to praise Donald Trump this time. I really thought when he announced a press conference that he would manage to stick to a reasonable script, and there were very promising rumors that he was prepared to make an excellent choice for a new coronavirus czar. Why? Because so much was on the ...

Standard Chartered Plc may have many failings. At least it has a leader. The London-based emerging markets bank run by Bill Winters hasn’t had the best of years, and the outlook, with so much exposure to virus-affected Hong Kong, is looking grim. It does, though, have a stable team, led by a CEO about to complete five years in the ...

Carl Icahn looks increasingly likely to get his way, even if it’s not on his own terms. The activist investor’s fingerprints appear all over Xerox Holdings Corp.’s $35 billion attempt to acquire HP Inc. But it always looked as if he might prefer the deal to happen the other way around. Indeed, he pitched an acquisition of Xerox to HP ...

The Olympic torch will arrive in Japan on March 20 for a four-month relay to launch the opening ceremonies for the Tokyo summer games. But rather than anticipating the sight of Olympic torchbearers, much of Japan is fixated on a different relay: hundreds of masked passengers grimly walking off the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama. The ship has ...

India has more than a sixth of the world’s population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race. For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the ...

The stock market’s longstanding skepticism about official real-estate valuations just got fresh support from a jumbo writedown at one of Britain’s biggest mall and office operators. Hammerson Plc’s results are yet again catching up with its depressed share price. The company resisted a takeover bid in 2018 by pointing out that its reported net asset value was higher than the ...

One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,” which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do. The first risk is that social impact investing ...

Bloomberg The first US coronavirus death. Signs the disease is squeezing China’s economy. A possible outbreak in Washington State. Trading may have stopped, but the drumbeat of alarming headlines hasn’t. That’s making investors anxious about what happens when markets reopen. While considerable bad news has already been priced in to stocks, with the S&P 500 down 13% in seven sessions ...

Bloomberg Last week was an expensive one for most investors, even for billionaires. The combined fortunes of the world’s 500 richest people fell by $444 billion as the coronavirus continued to spread — and spread fear — rattling equity markets worldwide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 12%, the biggest five-day slide since the depths of the 2008 ...

Bloomberg The world economy may be heading for its worst performance since the financial crisis more than a decade ago as the spread of the coronavirus increasingly dashes hopes of a swift rebound. Just weeks since most economists bet the China-led slump would quickly reverse once the virus was contained, many are rethinking that optimism as swathes of Chinese factories ...