Don’t cry for Argentina just yet. La Albiceleste’s new $20 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund might seem the dreary continuation of decades of interventions that failed to put the South American nation on stable economic footing. But by dismantling tight controls on the official value of its currency, President Javier Milei is opening the door to international trade just as crushing U.S. tariffs scramble global relationships. The larger-than-expected IMF package will backstop Argentina’s efforts to remove a peg on the peso in place since 2019. It was always a shaky effort: on Friday, the currency’s official price closed at 1,074 per U.S. dollar,

Apple will lose big in a trade war. The $2.7 trillion technology giant designs iPhones in California, assembles most in China, and sells them around the world. President Donald Trump’s decision to slap cumulative tariffs, including those scheduled for April 9, of 54% on Chinese imports, would reduce profit perhaps 15%. Retaliatory levies on overseas sales would be worse. But Apple’s increasing focus on selling services at least offers some consolation. During Trump’s first term in the White House, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook wrangled a tariff exemption. Perhaps he can again, given he has tried to curry favor, by hyping the

The U.S. tariffs bombshell has detonated across markets worldwide. Yields on 10-year Treasury bonds sagged, the dollar weakened, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes slumped 4% in New York morning trading a day after President Donald Trump unveiled a bewildering array of levies on imported goods. Combined, they imply an aggregate effective rate beyond 20%, its highest in a century by many estimates. The question now is whether Washington will get the message from Wall Street. The White House professes to no longer react to stock-price gyrations. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, has said repeatedly that the administration cares

OpenAI’s horizons are expanding. The latest funding round of the startup behind ChatGPT, unveiled on Monday, raised up to $40 billion from investors including SoftBank Group at a $300 billion valuation – nearly double what it fetched only six months ago. Yet the company’s path to profitability remains opaque. Boss Sam Altman admittedly has some encouraging-sounding figures. OpenAI is hoping to generate nearly $13 billion of revenue this year, Bloomberg reported citing sources familiar with the matter, about quadruple last year. While cash flow remained negative in 2024, Altman expects this to turn positive in 2029 – when OpenAI expects to make $125 billion

Lending is easy, one old banking adage states. It’s getting the money back that’s hard. Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later firm aiming for a U.S. market debut, wants to convince customers and investors that it has discovered a smoother alternative. But while Klarna would like to present itself as closer to Google than Goldman Sachs, conventional metrics suggest it is far from disrupting the laws of lending. Like other BNPL providers, Klarna specializes in short-term loans borrowers can pay back in instalments and often without interest. The initial public offering prospectus touts a loan loss rate of 0.47%

There’s a strong signal for boardrooms coming from the loud noise in Washington: brace for crisis. Senior Trump administration officials inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat, in the latest example of sloppiness with sensitive material. Companies entrust the government with loads of confidential information, too, and the risks of exposure are rising quickly. The U.S. capital is renowned for leaks to advance political agendas, but recent events suggest greater vulnerability to hacking and accidental slips. The Atlantic exposed on Monday that even top-secret information isn’t safe. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others used the commercial messaging

Semantic satiation is the technical term for what happens when a word or phrase loses its meaning from overuse. In the world of M&A, takeover targets shout “undervalued” in response to unwelcome acquisition offers so often that it’s easy for suitors and shareholders to tune it out. Beacon Roofing Supply’s $11 billion sale provides a perfect example of why it happens. CEOs and their advisers would be better served by choosing their words more carefully. QXO is effectively a shell company helmed by dealmaker Brad Jacobs that aims to roll up a building-products behemoth with $50 billion of sales, starting with Beacon.

Google’s yellow-brick road might be a path to nowhere. The search giant on Tuesday agreed to buy cybersecurity platform Wiz for $32 billion. It may help boss Sundar Pichai in his battle for the cloud, but the journey is riddled with potholes. Parent Alphabet is paying in cash to buy the startup backed by Blackstone, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. It was a hard-fought agreement. Back in the middle of last year, the technology goliath offered $23 billion for Wiz, according to the Wall Street Journal, which would already have made it Google’s largest acquisition. Talks collapsed in part over concerns that

The new top cop at the U.S. Federal Reserve hardly fits the presidential mold. Michelle Bowman, Donald Trump’s pick to be the central bank’s vice chair of supervision, has indicated that she believes in aligning federal rules with Europe and the rest of the world. If so, it would mean largely conforming to Basel 3, the sort of international accord the White House is trashing most everywhere else. Bowman should be a welcome choice to the eight systemically important U.S. banks, which include Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon led the charge against her predecessor, Michael Barr, who initially proposed

Capital-markets bankers started 2025 betting on an initial public offering boom. Now they’re facing a plot twist. Monday’s market selloff and surging volatility may give IPO hopefuls like Klarna, CoreWeave and others pause for thought. The headache for companies and advisers alike is that the wobbles may persist, which could force capital-hungry issuers to go ahead and take the plunge anyway. The year started off well. The S&P 500 Index hit record highs in February. Companies have raised a total of $7.1 billion on U.S. exchanges so far in 2025, the highest year-to-date total since 2021, per LSEG data. But the sentiment

It turns out that politicians really do have the power to wrest the economic cycle – in this case, to negative effect. After a monthlong reprieve, U.S. President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports are set to begin. Between haphazard spending cuts and will-he-won’t-he trade broadsides, the S&P 500 has coughed up nearly the entirety of its gains following Trump’s election, while forecasters have slashed growth projections. The most important reason: consumers, the engine of the U.S. economy, are pulling back, and it looks like it’s due to policy choices. Consumer confidence has declined rapidly since the administration began

How fast should an Asia-focused bank grow? There’s no right answer, but the long-term number probably ought to be higher than the 3% compound annual revenue increase that analysts are pencilling in for $200 billion HSBC between 2025 and 2027. New CEO Georges Elhedery announced a broadly sensible strategy for the lender on Wednesday, while implicitly acknowledging that the growth question is partly out of his hands. It makes a further valuation boost unlikely. The centrepiece of Elhedery’s announcement was a $1.5 billion annual cost-cut target by 2027, helped by closing bits of its U.S. and European investment bank. The move makes sense, but