When all is said and done, President Trump’s trade war may be fated to fail. There are many reasons why. One is that the target countries — prominently, China, Japan and Germany — won’t accede to his demands. This is already happening. Another threat is a backlash among US firms, hurt by tariffs that raise their products’ prices. This, too, ...

Google may be about to pair all that data it has on users’ web browsing with the ads displayed on public billboards. Creepy? Maybe. Inevitable? Almost certainly. The Alphabet Inc unit is in talks in Germany about pushing into out-of-home advertising – billboards in stations, shopping centers and shop windows – according to Wirtschafts Woche. The move would be a ...

Want to know what Amazon.com Inc. will be doing in physical retail tomorrow? Look at what is happening in China today. If you’d taken this advice, you wouldn’t have been surprised when the behemoth spent $13.7 billion last year buying Whole Foods. Eighteen months earlier Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. had launched Hema, a technologically advanced blend of online grocery shopping, ...

In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, regulators around the world have taken steps which, they argue, have greatly strengthened the resilience of the financial system. Buoyant asset prices and rising bank shares suggest that investors largely believe them. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain. That will only become clear in a real downturn, rather than ...

While this week’s episode of Tesla Inc has left us with several cliffhangers, it did show one thing: just how far the company has veered from Elon Musk’s secret “Master Plan” of 2006. Musk summarised it at the top of an updated version — ”Part Deux” — published in 2016: 1 Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be ...

Public corporations are an odd hybrid institution. They’re not really public in the sense of the government having a stake in them — they’re privately owned companies that follow government standards for financial reporting. In theory, this transparency makes them suitable for the public to invest in. Again in theory, this confers at least two benefits on a company. Financial ...

Go to any Indian airport, and it’ll appear that nearly all of the country’s billion-plus people have decided to fly. Yet talk to shareholders of India’s largest aviation businesses, and they’ll tell you how miserable they are. Oxygen masks have been down since last month’s 97 percent drop in quarterly profit for InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, which operates IndiGo, the budget ...

Bloomberg Barclays Plc, one of Europe’s biggest investment banks, hired a team of equity analysts from rival Societe Generale SA as Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley seeks to make more money from trading stocks. Warren Ackerman has joined from the French bank as head of European consumer equity research along with Michael Sanderson, who will be Barclays’s co-head of diversified ...

Bloomberg The coming week may prove to be a crucial one for the Indonesian rupiah. As Wednesday’s policy decision approaches, Bank Indonesia finds itself under pressure to raise the benchmark rate again even after increasing it by a combined 100 basis points since mid-May to stem a slide in the currency. Rupiah headwinds have steadily increased in recent weeks and ...

Bloomberg The outsize growth of a country’s banks is a sign that credit expansion is faster there than in other nations. In 1988, 9 of the 10 largest banks in the world were Japanese. Three years later the country’s financial system, along with its lenders, collapsed, sending Japan into its infamous lost decade (or three, considering the country is still ...