Business/Business Views

By Richard Gott Some years ago, travelling on the presidential plane of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela with a French friend from Le Monde Diplomatique, we were asked what we thought was happening in Europe. Was there any chance of a move to the left? We...

By felix salmon The Facebook IPO is now set to raise an absolutely astonishing amount of money — as much as $18bn, if the greenshoe is exercised and the offering prices at the top of the indicated range. As a result, it’s certain to be the sing...

By Simon Kenkins A looming black cloud is hurtling forwards over the European horizon. It is called economic nemesis, driven to a fury by a quarter century of the naivety and greed of most of the continent’s rulers. In Berlin and Brussels this wee...

By Paul Taylor Americans call it a Rube Goldberg machine, Britons a Heath Robinson contraption and the Danes a Storm P machine. The European Union’s policy-making system often resembles one of those cartoon designs of an implausibly convoluted sys...

By Felix Salmon We’re still not much the wiser on exactly how the London Whale managed to lose $2bn this quarter, but I think Matt Levine has the smartest take. (This is why the blogosphere is so great: it’s full of people who used to do this ki...

By Ed Balls & Peter Mandelson The coming months are critical for the future of Europe. Jobs and business investment – in Britain and across the euro area – depend on Europe’s leaders choosing the right course. The risk is that Europe gets lock...

By Alan Wheatley Students are protesting on Barcelona’s elegant boulevards, public-sector wages are being cut for the second time in three years and resentment is growing against the central government and beneficiaries of bank bailouts. Such is ...

By david rohde JPMorgan’s surprise announcement late Thursday of a $2bn trading loss – and the drop in stocks it sparked – is yet another sign of the need for reform. The numbers are startling. HSBC, the world’s fifth-largest bank, failed t...

By Mark Elzweig As Morgan Stanley’s retail force is learning, it’s hard being the anointed one. To most of the world, Morgan Stanley got the plum job of lead manager for the most important public stock offering since Google in 2004. But among th...

By will hutton It is a ghastly choice for Greece and Spain, one that will determine the future of the euro. Intriguingly, opinion polls in both countries report massive majorities in favour of staying inside the single currency. Yet both suffer fro...

By Simon Denyer There are few places in the world where the opportunity for solar power is more blindingly obvious than India. There are also few industries where the possibility of collaboration between India and the United States is more tantalizi...

By Nicola LeskeHuawei’s head of research and development in North America said his company is more than ready to take on larger rival Cisco Systems but noted it will take some patience—and time. “The US is by far our most complex market ... for...

By Seltem Iyigun     Credit rating agencies are used to criticism from governments which don’t like their decisions. But Standard & Poor’s may still have been taken back by the vehemence of Turkey’s reaction last week when S&P made a minor ...

By Nigel Stephenson Greek voters’ rejection of pro-bailout political parties in Sunday’s election has raised the chances of Greece leaving the euro but this unprecedented step is seen as manageable rather than catastrophic for the currency bloc....

By till Van Treeck The idea that the Great Recession of 2008 may have been caused not just by careless banking but also social inequality is currently all the rage among macroeconomists. Much of the impetus for the current debate stems from the wid...

By simon jenkins Europe’s collective response to the 2008 credit crunch ranks with the treaty of Versailles and German reparations among the great follies of history. While the peoples of Greece, Spain, Italy and France wrestle with counter-produc...

By dean baker Austerity was the big loser in the Greek elections on Sunday. The two main Greek parties, who endorsed the austerity pact signed last year, together got just over one-third of the vote. This is an extraordinary rebuke given that, betwe...

By Aditya Chakrabortty At the fag end of one university term, two Cambridge economists set about persuading a prime minister to do a U-turn. Somehow, they thought a letter would do the trick. So opposed were Frank Hahn and Robert Neild to Margaret T...

By hugo dixon It has become fashionable to talk about the need for a euro zone “growth compact” as weariness mounts over a diet of nothing but austerity. France’s new president Francois Hollande has popularised the idea. Even Mario Draghi ha...

By Hashim Al Sayed The incident in Tunisia in which a young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in front of the headquarters of Sidi Buzaid province was the spark that ignited the spring of Arab revolutions that swept Arab countries from Tun...

By david cay Johnston Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95bn to its surplus and lifted 20m Americans of all ages out of poverty? Why, Social Security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7trn surplus. That surplus ...

By Noah Barkin Greek voters dealt a serious blow yesterday to the fragile political consensus that has kept Europe’s currency bloc intact through more than two years of crisis, rejecting the austerity-for-aid policies that have shielded the countr...

By Ole Hansen (Head of Commodity Strategy, Saxo Bank) Economic activity during Q2 is showing signs of a slow-down. Of concern is especially US economic data and uncertainty about the political direction in China combined with data pointing towards a...

By Tony Munroe Whatever its intentions in cracking down on abuse of tax havens, India has alienated overseas investors with the timing and communication of its measures when it can ill afford to do so. India’s move to target tax evaders through a ...

By Sylvia Westall In a region dominated by sovereign and government-related bond issues, Kuwait has bucked the trend over recent months with a series of successful corporate sales that hint at greater capital-raising potential in the Gulf state. Th...

By Felix Salmon It was a little bit uncomfortable, watching Jason Tanz talk to Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler at today’s Wired conference. Jason, who’s my editor at Wired when I write for them, tried in a couple of ways to ask the kind ...

By Lawrence summers Once again European efforts to contain crisis have fallen short. It was perhaps reasonable to hope that the European Central Bank’s commitment to provide nearly a trillion dollars in cheap three-year funding to banks would, if ...

By Noah Barkin While its European partners agonise about recession, austerity and rising unemployment, Germany is shifting its attention to a very different, and yet familiar, source of angst - inflation. Despite recent data showing German consumer ...

By Ha-Joon Chang Following the news that Britain has entered the dreaded double-dip recession, those who support the coalition’s austerity policy say that this is just a “technical” recession, as growth is bound to happen in the next quarter. ...

  By Krista Hughes Import restrictions imposed by Argentina and Brazil may end up harming the very domestic industries they are trying to protect and also could affect other economies in Latin America. Trade experts and policymakers from trading ...