The Big Picture | Business Post

The Big Picture

Vincent Boland: Why the crypto crash was a calamity waiting to happen

Hyped and marketed to a ridiculous extent by its backers, the $2.5 trillion virtual ‘currency’ segment of the market was always going to collide head-on with reality. The question is: what happens next?

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Vincent Boland: Big Mac peace theory bites the dust as more countries lose appetite for free trade

Once an article of faith for the great capitalist nations, free trade is becoming increasingly unpopular as countries turn to protectionism, something that will make us all poorer in the long run

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Vincent Boland: ESG movement imploding after falling into the trap of believing its own publicity

The probe into German asset manager DWS has revealed a fatal flaw in the much-lauded concept of ethical investment: no one agrees on what it actually means

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Vincent Boland: Glencore’s shaming lifts the lid on the murky business of commodity trading

The metals and energy trading giant is finally facing a reckoning after decades of alleged dubious business practices. Other Big Commodities should face similar scrutiny

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Vincent Boland: After 40 years of freakish growth, China’s economy is at a crossroads

Recent actions by Xi Jinping’s government, including its strict Covid lockdown in Shanghai, have sowed doubt about the sustainability of the ‘party-state capitalism’ model

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Vincent Boland: A €16bn valuation gap is enough to give anyone the Twitter jitters

Elon Musk is now wriggling to escape a trap of his own making in his pursuit of the social media platform, but whatever the outcome, Musk owns this debacle

Vincent Boland: A new decade of austerity is looming and we are woefully unprepared for it

Globalisation is in retreat, the tech revolution is slowing down and public debt is rising

Vincent Boland: Fall of Archegos could change how the stock market is played

The collapse of the hedge fund, which built a $36 billion house of cards, may be one catalyst among many for the most sweeping reforms of the stock market in decades

Vincent Boland: Berlin is the weak link in the West’s attempt to halt Putin’s war

Europe’s largest economy relies on Russian gas to fuel its industries and heat its homes. Severing that link will be hard for hesitant German leader Olaf Scholz, but time is running out for Ukraine

Vincent Boland: For all its faults, the modern, democratic, capitalist, globalised world in which we live is worth defending, and fighting for

Doing business is becoming ever more political as the right turns on its corporate base

Vincent Boland: ‘Z’ is for the zombie state that Putin has built on lies and paranoia

The first victims of Putin’s futile war are the people of Ukraine, but it is also a catastrophe for the Russian people who face long, dark years ahead

Vincent Boland: By rights, Johnson should have been undone by the disaster of Brexit

The sad irony of the Global Britain tag is that the country was a true global economy before the Tories put it into reverse

Vincent Boland: Peloton won’t be the last pandemic poster child to shrink back to size

As investors react to the end of the ‘free money’ era, any stock market bubble inflated by the likes of GameStop, trillion-dollar Tesla or bitcoin is liable to collide with reality

Vincent Boland: Chronically underperforming Unilever long past its salad days

The venerable British consumer goods giant is now in the crosshairs of a disaffected fund manager who accuses the company of having lost the plot

Vincent Boland: End of Airbus’s double-decker a sign of aviation’s changed flight plan

The aerospace giant and its fierce rival Boeing face enormous challenges in the years ahead, and both need to be airborne again before long

Vincent Boland: The investor’s dream: Apple remains above the noisy fray of Silicon Valley

The seemingly untouchable tech giant’s value briefly grazed $3tn last week, but its shrewd chief executive will be aware, as the fate of BlackBerry shows, that nothing lasts forever

Vincent Boland: Erdoğan’s economic tinkering could bring Turkey to breaking point

It beggars belief that Turkey’s canny and populist leader is crippling his country’s economy by cutting interest rates in the midst of a currency crisis. And voters may finally have had enough of him

Vincent Boland: In the age of passive investing, there is a place for aggressive activism

It has been a watershed year for activist investors as some of the world’s largest corporations such as Exxon, Shell and Danone found their boards under siege. And the activists now have secretive world of commodity trading in their sights

Vincent Boland: The current chill doesn’t have to lead to another Cold War

Last week’s first meeting between US president Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping did little to reduce the gulf between the two superpowers but there are some reasons to hope that the world can avoid a prolonged conflict

Vincent Boland: Japanese finance’s favourite Son loses knack of picking winners

Masayoshi Son’s attempt to reinvigorate his beloved SoftBank by mounting a share buyback is a lame attempt to rouse it out of its own inertia