Panama: Where the World Goes to Park Its Dirty Laundry By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice when you land in Panama City is how aggressively new everything looks. Skyscrapers erupt like chrome mushrooms after a rainstorm of offshore cash. The second thing you notice is that half the…
THE LAST SUPPER BEFORE CHAPTER 11: RED LOBSTER SINKS WHILE THE WORLD WATCHES WITH BUTTERED POPCORN By the time the news crawled across my phone at 3 a.m. in a rainswept Istanbul hostel, Red Lobster had already filed for Chapter 11 from the comfort of Orlando—city of theme-park miracles and, apparently, seafood insolvency. Let us…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the hygge glow of a Danish bodega and the neon anxiety of a 24-hour Bloomberg terminal, NBIS stock (Nordic Blockchain Infrastructure Services A/S) has become the world’s favorite new punch line about how we never actually learn. The Copenhagen-based firm, whose logo looks suspiciously like a QR code having a mid-life crisis, claims…
SYDNEY—If you squint at the skyline long enough, you can almost see the Murdoch empire’s shadow lengthening across three oceans, a Rorschach blot of satellites, tabloids, and streaming pixels. At the blot’s center stands Lachlan Murdoch: heir, enigma, and—depending on which brunch table you pollute—either the last lion tamer of legacy media or the trust-fund…
Retirement Planning: The World’s Most Expensive Waiting Room By Our Correspondent, presently in one of those “wellness” cafés that charge extra for existential dread ZURICH—On the polished parquet of Credit Suisse’s flagship branch, a septuagenarian in Loro Piana loafers is asking whether his 3-million-franc nest egg will still cover a flat white when he turns…
The Global Bazaar of Hope and Hubris by our correspondent in three time-zones and one existential crisis If you want to see humanity at its most optimistic and delusional in equal measure, skip the dating apps and go straight to the investment pages. From a glass tower in Singapore where a 29-year-old analyst just bet…
Charlie Ming, the Man Who Outsourced Apocalypse GENEVA—While the rest of us spent the pandemic arguing over sourdough starters and which Netflix series most accurately predicted the collapse of Western civilization, Charlie Ming quietly built the algorithm that now decides whether your next shipment of baby formula leaves the port of Rotterdam. If that sounds…
Delta Air Lines: When a Georgia Peach Tries to Fly the Whole World By Our Man in Seat 24B, Somewhere over the Doldrums There are airlines that merely move people; then there is Delta Air Lines, an Atlanta-born overachiever that appears determined to drag the entire planet through Hartsfield-Jackson whether it wants to go or…
PNC FirstBank Holding: When Two American Mid-Tier Banks Decide to Tango, the World Hums Along—Barely By the time the press release landed in inboxes from Singapore to São Paulo, most global investors had already yawned, refilled their cortados, and returned to the far more pressing question of whether China will actually invade Taiwan before lunch….
PNC Bank Gobbles FirstBank, and the World Pretends Not to Yawn By Hugo Valdez-Cortez, International Finance Correspondent on his third espresso and last nerve When PNC Financial Services announced it would inhale FirstBank Holding Co. for an undisclosed-but-whispered-to-be-jaw-dropping sum, the reaction outside North America was the polite shrug usually reserved for a distant cousin’s third…
StubHub’s IPO: Selling Tickets to a Show Called Late-Stage Capitalism by Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent When StubHub filed to go public last week, the planet’s collective reaction was less “Wow, live events are back!” and more “Ah yes, another marketplace for the same Beyoncé ticket, now with quarterly guidance.” From the bourses of New York…
Interest Rates: The Global Game of Financial Whack-a-Mole By Our Man in the Currency Bunker, somewhere between Frankfurt and FOMO Somewhere on a Bloomberg terminal, a red arrow blinks like a tiny, strobing heart attack. That, dear reader, is the world’s pulse today—set by a committee of twelve serious people in Washington who decide how…
