Who lost Lehman Brothers? Could it have been saved? As we approach the 10th anniversary of Lehman’s collapse (September 15), these questions won’t go away. The Lehman bankruptcy is portrayed as the pivotal event that converted severe — but familiar — disruptions in financial markets into a full-blown panic. Nothing like it had occurred in the United States since the ...

September in the European corporate debt market is often a time of much rejoicing. The dearth of activity in August is replaced by a flood of issuance, tightening spreads, and a general feeling that bonds are back. Not this time. This August has been particularly miserable, and almost all of the factors that made it that way have every reason ...

With its blistering pace of comparable sales growth in the second quarter, Walmart Inc. threw down the retail gauntlet when it reported earnings last week. Target Corp answered with some impressive results of its own. The big-box retailer reported that comparable sales increased 6.5 percent in the second quarter over a year earlier, its biggest growth on this measure in ...

Over the past decade, a lot of capital has flowed into emerging markets thanks in part to excessive liquidity in advanced economies. This money has often found its way into risky or suspect investment structures. Should a crisis strike — say, contagion from Turkey — investors in these markets will be exposed to risks that they simply aren’t prepared for. ...

With the latest round of trade talks between the US and China ending in a predictable stalemate, one thing has become clear: The Trump administration’s approach to these negotiations has made it all but impossible for Chinese President Xi Jinping to make a deal. Until that changes, there’s no end in sight for the tariff-for-tariff tussle between the two countries, ...

The natural state of a capitalist economy is expansion. Recessions occur when “something breaks” rather than an expansion simply dying of old age. Unfortunately, central banks have a history of pumping the brakes for too long and too hard when attempting to contain growth and inflation and are often the cause of a recession. Given that the Federal Reserve has ...

I feel like I’ve had illnesses that lasted longer than Tesla Inc.’s completely serious process of considering a buyout. Or maybe it just reminded me of being ill: the disorientation, the fever dreams, the sense that, surely, it must all end soon. And end it did, in the most apt way possible: a blog post saying that, after all of ...

Bloomberg Nordea Bank AB has recently lost a number of its top sell-side bankers amid complaints that management’s focus on cutting 6,000 jobs is hurting morale in key parts of the business. Examples of recent departures include the head of fixed income at Nordea Markets, Torben Pedersen. He’s in the process of starting his own hedge fund with Erik Bo ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Thailand is giving the baht — the most-loved emerging-market currency this month — one more reason to keep up its outperformance. Piggybacking on a strong current-account surplus, the baht has braved developing-market doldrums and topped returns among 24 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. It is also the sole gainer in Asia this quarter. As investors await the ...

Bloomberg The People’s Bank of China and Federal Reserve delivered a one-two punch to the dollar, spurring the biggest selloff in a month and raising the specter of further weakness ahead. The PBOC announced that banks would resume using the “counter-cyclical” factor when calculating the yuan’s daily reference rate, restraining the influence of market forces that have been driving the ...