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The Big Picture

Vincent Boland: Modest but significant protests pierce Xi Jinping’s aura of invincibility

As protests continue to break out across China in a population thoroughly sick of the president’s crushing zero-Covid policy, he may be turning a potential victory over the virus into a far greater defeat

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Vincent Boland: It proved to be a short spell at the top for Disney’s king of the castle

Picking a successor is not easy and Bob Chapek’s dismissal as Disney boss is an admission of failure by the entertainment giant’s directors — as well as a textbook example of poor corporate governance

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Vincent Boland: Reading between the lines, the US-China ‘new cold war’ is very real

At the first ever presidential face-to-face meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at the G20 in Bali, it was clear that the gulf which divides them is far wider than the Taiwan Strait

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From hero to zero: is fall of FTX crypto’s own Lehman moment?

Sam Bankman-Fried, the brilliant young founder of FTX, was supposed to be the person who made crypto currencies respectable – but as the firm’s value plummeted from $32 billion to virtually nothing, investors were left wondering what went wrong

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Vincent Boland: Brazil needs more than Lula to bring it back from the brink

The new left-wing president leads a deeply divided country, with a stagnant economy and severely damaged self-esteem

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Vincent Boland: Rarefied air of the metaverse proving too thin for investors

A year after Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta, his $30 billion long-term bet on an unknown future has failed to convince even his most stalwart backers

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Vincent Boland: Is Goldman Sachs facing its own bonfire of the vanities?

The travails of the old titan of Wall Street suggest that investment banking has peaked and that it, and the bank, may soon face a reckoning

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Vincent Boland: Xi Jinping’s New Era risks dragging China back into the economic wilderness

The Chinese president is likely to be in power for another five years, possibly indefinitely. His record as paramount leader of an increasingly inward-looking regime does not bode well for China in dealing with the challenges it faces

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Vincent Boland: How the tantrum-prone Tesla tycoon caved on Twitter deal

Elon Musk didn’t win one concession from the social media platform, so he finally stopped whingeing and will pay the original asking price of $44 billion. Now he has to try to recoup some of that cash

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Vincent Boland: Tories have learned nothing from history as they believe their own delusions

There are many examples to debunk the myth that the Conservatives are the party of fiscal discipline; chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s ruinous, unfunded budget is just the latest of them

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Vincent Boland: Porsche’s IPO will drive straight into a hostile stock market

The transaction values the luxury car maker at €75 billion – but the IPO market is in the doldrums to a degree not seen in over a decade

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Vincent Boland: Plunging market tells us the Fed is no longer the investor’s friend

Last Tuesday was the day it became clear that the Goldilocks era, when central banks kept materialising to soothe every market tantrum, is now over

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Vincent Boland: Truss’s agenda from a vanished age unlikely to save poor old Britannia

A country struggling with chronic economic weakness and low productivity will now be led by a prime minister whose ideas are steeped in Thatcherite nostalgia

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Vincent Boland: Is this energy crunch a passing phenomenon or is it here to stay?

Norway’s recent row with its neighbours over any curbs on its energy exports is an unexpected and perhaps extreme illustration of the depth of the energy crisis facing Europe

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Vincent Boland: Defiance of Ukrainians is inspirational, but defeat of Putin will take time

Putin’s war involves the wholesale destruction of the very region he craves to call his own. But the Russian economy is about to shrink dramatically and its people have no idea of the catastrophe creeping up on them

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Vincent Boland: Disney’s magic kingdom finds itself at the centre of a culture war

The entertainment giant might be going from strength to strength financially, but political turmoil in the once liberal Sunshine State and demands from an activist investor now threaten it from all sides

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Vincent Boland: SoftBank’s troubles may be an ominous sign of things to come

Now that the era of cheap money that drove the success of the private equity sector is coming to an end, the billionaire Masayoshi Son may not be the only one whose fortunes are turning

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Vincent Boland: Deflating Spac bubble takes the air out of Trump’s stock market plans

Special-purpose acquisition companies, or ‘blank cheque’ entities, came into their own during the pandemic, but as with other lockdown booms, their days are numbered

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Vincent Boland: Breaking up is hard to do in the case of Musk and his unloved new Twitter toy

The unedifying Twitter saga has already exposed the Tesla tycoon as a clown, but regardless of how the case plays out, the rules around mergers and acquisitions may have to be rewritten

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Vincent Boland: It’s time for the grown ups to pick up the pieces after all the buffoonery

The Johnson era has been a disaster and Britain needs to stop indulging in delusions if it is to rebuild relations with its allies and friends