Zeynep Sönmez Is Not Your Feel-Good Sports Story—She’s the Canary in Tennis’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you blinked during the third round of Roland-Garros you might have missed her: a 20-year-old Turk with a backhand like a scimitar and a surname that looks like autocorrect’s revenge. Zeynep Sönmez dispatched the world…
When Parvez Hossain Emon clobbers another half-tracker into orbit, the ball rockets past Dhaka’s sodium lights and keeps climbing, destined—if you believe the breathless local headlines—for low-earth orbit somewhere over the Bay of Bengal. Somewhere above the flight path of container ships carrying knock-off Nikes to Rotterdam, a white Kookaburra becomes a temporary satellite in…
MP Stock: When a Tiny Indian Micronutrient Maker Becomes the Canary in Everyone’s Coal Mine By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones at once Mumbai—On paper, MP Stock—ticker MP Agro Nutrients Ltd., population 1,200 employees and one very excitable parakeet in the lobby—should be a footnote. The company makes chelated zinc for rice…
SEOUL—Somewhere in the gleaming, algorithmic hive of Gangnam, a man named Michael Kim is quietly re-writing the rules of global capitalism, one leveraged buyout at a time. To the average Seoulite he is merely another well-tailored ghost gliding through steel lobbies; to the rest of the planet he is the Korean Midas who turns conglomerate…
Tokyo’s salarymen, Lagos’s side-hustlers, and Frankfurt’s fund managers all woke up this week to the same notification: XRP is on another tear—or tumble, depending on which timezone you happen to be doom-scrolling in. At 06:14 UTC the token flickered 5 % higher, then slid 7 % by the time Jakarta’s mosques issued the second call…
Ban vs Afg: The World Watches Two Letters Decide the Fate of Eleven Men and 38 Million Others By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge from Dubai to Doha When the International Cricket Council (ICC) scheduled “BAN vs AFG” for the T20 World Cup, the acronym looked like a typo for a Balkan trade dispute….
Walmart Stock Surges, Planet Slightly Winces By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS—While European ministers argue over olive-oil subsidies and Chinese brokers refresh their screens for the next Evergrande shoe to drop, America’s favorite fluorescent temple to bulk mayonnaise has quietly ascended to new stock-price altitudes. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) closed Friday at an all-time…
**The Atyr Stock Phenomenon: When Kazakh Oil Money Meets Global Capitalism’s Fever Dream** In the grand casino of global finance, where fortunes rise and fall faster than a dictator’s approval ratings, Atyr stock has emerged as the latest contestant in humanity’s ongoing game of “Who Wants to Be a Petroleum Millionaire?” The Kazakh oil company,…
Hong Kong vs Bangladesh: When a Glittering Finance Hub Discovers Gravity By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Too Many “Emerging Market” PowerPoints Burst into Flames HONG KONG—If you squint past the harbor-front Chanel billboards, you can almost see the moment Hong Kong’s self-image slipped on a banana peel labeled “GDP per capita.” On the same…
ASTS Stock: When Space Phones Become the New Oil, and the Irony Is Out of This World By Dexter Voss, Senior Orbital Affairs Correspondent It turns out the final frontier isn’t serenity or starlight—it’s a balance sheet. AST SpaceMobile (ticker: ASTS) has spent the past month rocketing up retail watch-lists like a drunk cosmonaut on…
Hood Stock and the Global Bazaar of Rebellious Capital By G. M. Delacroix, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic It began, as most modern morality tales do, on a subreddit. A horde of screen-locked millennials—armed with stimulus checks, Robinhood accounts, and the attention span of fruit flies—decided that the corner bodega could double as the…
