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By John Foley
A long-awaited blueprint for reform covers everything from relaxing the one-child policy to opening the financial sector. But instead of firm targets, “deepenings” and “perfectings” abound. It’s enough to assuage some worries, but not yet sufficient to inspire new investments.

GE finally puts Jack Welch era out to pasture

By Antony Currie
The conglomerate is spinning off its North America retail finance business. The move helps return GE Capital to its roots lending to mid-market companies and its parent’s industrial units, spelling the end of GE’s mission creep under its ex-CEO. That’s good news for shareholders.

Review: At Apple's core, a fitting man of mystery

By Richard Beales
Jony Ive is the British perfectionist who leads the U.S. tech giant’s design team. A new book shows his huge influence uniting form and function at Apple. But Ive the man remains largely hidden behind a screen that’s as obsessively crafted as any of the company’s gadgets.
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Banks’ bad IPO habits spread to China bond deals

By Una Galani
Despite booming bond issuance by Chinese groups, banks are crowding into new offers. Companies keep lenders happy by dispensing league table credit to many book runners. As in the equity market, though, working for measly fees is a poor way for bankers to justify their existence.

Snapchat bid triples Facebook's desperation

By Robert Cyran
Mark Zuckerberg's social network shelled out $1 bln for no-revenue Instagram last year. Now it's dangling $3 bln to a mobile application that sends self-destructing digital images. Facebook's escalating need to buy off marauders at its moat suggests its defenses are scalable.

QE’s surprising beneficiaries: taxpayers

By Peter Thal Larsen
That’s according to McKinsey, which reckons low interest rates saved western governments $1.6 trillion. Totting up winners and losers is hard, as we can’t know how economies would have fared otherwise. At least the study helps debunk the idea that money-printing only aids the rich.

Nirvana eludes Japan after one year of Abenomics

By Andy Mukherjee
GDP growth halved in the third quarter. But investors are worried about something else. One year after Shinzo Abe chalked out a path to revival, Japan is still awaiting the structural reforms he promised. Without them, the effect of monetary and fiscal stimulus could soon wane.

A trio of finance lessons from Bacon's triptych

By Richard Beales
The record-busting $142 mln sale by Christie’s of the artist’s set of paintings of Lucian Freud shows a contemporary art market in heady territory. The mind-boggling price paid for Bacon’s extraordinary work suggests three tenuous extrapolations for the broader world of money.
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