The first annual results season is underway since the Business Roundtable, a US group of top bosses chaired by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, clarified the “purpose of a corporation” back in August. It should be a moment for CEOs, including Dimon, to show they’re serious about the commitments they made, and for investors to hold ...

The reputation of Masayoshi Son, the world’s most prolific unicorn breeder, came crashing down last year with the collapse of WeWork. An 80% writedown on The We Co., and a 970 billion yen ($8.8 billion) loss at the SoftBank Vision Fund delivered some cold hard truths about his vulnerability. You might think that Son would have learned his lesson. Instead, ...

BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink published two letters — one to CEOs, one to BlackRock clients — outlining the asset manager’s environmental, social and governance priorities for 2020 and beyond. To say the letters’ import is significant doesn’t nearly do it justice. Last week, I attended a conference of energy CEOs, executive board members, institutional investors and proxy ...

For much of Donald Trump’s presidency, the economy’s historically low unemployment rate has coexisted with the president’s historically low approval rating. “The fact that we have the strongest economy in 50 years and he’s stuck at 43% approval ought to scream volumes for his language and his overreach,” one Republican pollster said. That’s one explanation. There is another: The US ...

Five years ago, in a routine display of trash talking, Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk made a now infamous quip about how hard it is to manufacture automobiles. “Cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches,’’ he told German newspaper Handelsblatt. “You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car.” He may be proven ...

Bloomberg US equity-index futures gained on Wednesday as China took steps to contain the spread of a deadly virus that had rattled international markets. Treasuries and the dollar were steady. Contracts on the three main American equity indexes all rose, with Netflix Inc and International Business Machines Corp climbing in the premarket as traders digested their earnings. The Stoxx Europe ...

Bloomberg Southeast Asian companies seeking to list in Hong Kong may be better off staying at home as investors in the financial hub continue to avoid small-cap stocks. Initial public offerings from Southeast Asian companies in Hong Kong are generally tiny. The average deal size of such IPOs last year stood at just $15.3 million, according to data compiled by ...

Bloomberg Some investors may have been taking advantage of the sell-off in Asian stocks to position for a rebound. While the iShares China Large-Cap ETF tumbled the most in two years on news that the coronavirus out of China has spread, Susquehanna Financial Group spotted buyers of bullish options. Four of the five most-traded contracts on US-listed exchange-traded fund were ...

Bloomberg Some of the world’s major central banks are teaming up to assess potentially developing their own digital currencies, acknowledging that their role is being challenged by new technologies and private sector initiatives such as Facebook Inc’s Libra. A group has been formed in order to “share experience as they assess the potential cases for central bank digital currency (CBDC) ...

Bloomberg Bank of England (BOE) governor Mark Carney warned of mounting risks to the financial sector and the economy from climate change, and urged the US to play bigger role. “Something which was largely on the periphery of finance has come into the mainstream,” Carney told Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Bloomberg Climate Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Transition risk ...