Markets Slouch Toward Tokyo: A Global Fainting Couch for the Red Numbers By the time Wall Street’s opening bell finished echoing across the Atlantic, traders in London had already poured their second consolatory whisky and Tokyo’s salarymen were dozing on the last bullet train home, portfolios tucked under their arms like broken umbrellas. The world’s…
S&P 500: The World’s Favorite American Soap Opera By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Between Frankfurt and Existential Dread The S&P 500 closed at yet another all-time high last week, prompting champagne corks in Greenwich, polite golf claps in Geneva, and a low, guttural groan everywhere else. From the bodegas of Buenos Aires…
The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: A Timeline of Marseille vs PSG, or How France Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grudge Match By the time the first whistle blew in 1971, Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain had already mastered the only skill that truly matters in modern sport: holding a grudge. What began…
Marseille vs PSG: A Mediterranean Derby for the Age of Globalized Grudges By Dave’s Locker International Desk When Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain kick off at the Vélodrome this Sunday, 11,000 ultras will scream themselves hoarse, Qatari soft-power accountants will check their ROI spreadsheets on encrypted phones, and somewhere in Lagos a betting syndicate…
Reform UK and the Return of Farage: The Empire’s Last Punchline Goes Global From a safe distance—say, a café terrace in Lisbon where the espresso is strong enough to cauterize your existential dread—you can almost admire the sheer, stubborn persistence of Nigel Farage. The man has resurrected his political career more times than a Marvel…
From his perch above a London coffee chain that charges £4 for lukewarm existential dread, Martin Lewis—the man Britain trusts more than its own cabinet—has spent two decades coaxing savers toward marginally less awful interest rates. What began as a cheery BBC segment on “finding the best ISA” has quietly metastasised into a transnational coping…
Armonk, New York – In the hushed, climate-controlled lairs where money mutates faster than a Wuhan lab rumor, IBM’s share price has been staging the financial equivalent of a mid-life crisis: still upright, still wearing a tie, but quietly Googling “cognitive therapy” and “quantum Pilates.” At roughly $192 a pop, the stock is up 15…
The phrase “SEC permanent opponents” sounds like a Pentagon euphemism for countries Washington never plans to invite to the cookout. In fact, it is a scheduling innovation cooked up by the Southeastern Conference—American college football’s most profitable circus—to guarantee that certain teams play each other every year even after the league swelled to 16 members…
Tom Voyce: The Man Whose Name Travels Better Than He Does By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic If you’ve spent any time on the rugby terraces of Europe, the antipodean press boxes, or the darker recesses of expat bars in Dubai, you’ve probably heard the name “Tom Voyce” muttered with the same cocktail of…
River Ouse: The Quiet English Waterway Quietly Judging the Rest of the Planet From the chalk hills of East Sussex to the North Sea’s grey shrug, the River Ouse ambles 35 miles across southern England like a pensioner who has already seen the worst of humanity and decided apathy is the only rational response. To…
The curiously code-named “RR stock” has been lurching across trading screens from São Paulo to Singapore like a drunken aristocrat at last call, generating the sort of global buzz usually reserved for royal weddings or minor nuclear incidents. At first glance it appears to be nothing more than the ticker for Rolls-Royce Holdings—yes, the same…
Plug Power’s shares—ticker PLUG, affectionately nick-named “plug stock” by traders who like their acronyms short and their existential crises shorter—have spent the last year staging a masterclass in how renewable hope collides with fossil-fuel reality. From Frankfurt’s glass-walled trading floors to the fluorescent back-rooms of Manila’s brokerage houses, the hydrogen darling has become a global…
