FEW INDUSTRIES are more vulnerable to events that depress revenues and increase expenses than America’s railways. The basic business model is to lug lots of stuff to offset the high fixed costs...
PITY BEN VAN BEURDEN. The boss of Royal Dutch Shell is an affable man steering a Scylla-and-Charybdis course between oil-loving shareholders on one extreme and carbon-hating ones on the other. His latest...
REED HASTINGS HAS built the culture at Netflix around it. Ray Dalio made it a founding principle at Bridgewater, a successful investment fund. “Radical candour” is the idea that bracing honesty is...
WHEN SOTHEBY’S raised the gavel on the season’s biggest art auction on November 15th the sellers, Harry and Linda Macklowe, did not arrive as one to watch the proceedings from the discreet...
IN THEORY THIS should be a good time to be Walmart, the doyen of American retailers that came of age in the stagflationary era of the 1970s. Inflation is back, yet no...
The Economist is hiring a senior business writer to provide thematic features across geographies and sectors. Applicants need not be journalists but should be stylish writers and financially literate. Please send a...
THE PLANET is black, perfectly spherical, does not really exist, and is exactly 65,536km round (being the sixteenth power of two, a number any hacker worth their salt would recognise). A single...
IT MIGHT BE confused for one of the world’s savviest tech investors. China Internet Investment Fund’s (CIIF) portfolio is the envy of venture capitalists everywhere. It owns part of ByteDance, the Beijing-based...
