The Week in Breakingviews |
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The Week in Breakingviews |
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Insights from Reuters global financial commentary team |
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By Peter Thal Larsen, Global Editor |
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Welcome back! This week, Breakingviews celebrated its 25th anniversary, prompting us to look back at the last quarter-century. Even setting aside the clear parallels with the stock market bubble which peaked shortly before we published our first columns, some big themes stand out. As always, email me with any suggestions. If someone forwarded you this newsletter, sign up here to receive it free in your inbox every Saturday. |
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| Five things I learned from Breakingviews this week |
- Of the new medications launched in the U.S. over the past five years, 40% have not made it to Europe. (Read on Reuters.com)
- 1.4% of private investment funds by assets will change hands on the secondary market this year. (Read on Reuters.com)
- Fintech SoFi Technologies advertises $3 million of federal deposit insurance per customer. The official limit is $250,000.
- More than 90% of companies in the S&P 500 Index now report non-GAAP numbers.
- China built more commercial ships by tonnage last year than the U.S. has completed since World War Two.
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Fireworks explode as "2025" is projected on to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, January 1, 2025. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes |
Retrospection and self-congratulation do not come naturally to most journalists. The profession tends to focus on the newest twist, while glancing sceptically at those who rest on past laurels. Yet some milestones are worth noting. Breakingviews passed such a landmark this week when we celebrated our 25th anniversary. It seems an appropriate moment to take stock and reflect on what has changed. One benefit of publishing daily for two-and-a-half decades is a well-stocked archive. From that repository of around 60,000 columns, we plucked 25 that offer a sample of the sharp, analytical, engaging and at times irreverent insights Breakingviews columnists have served up to readers since 2000. You can download the resulting e-book, "Long Story Short", here. Historical echoes are hard to ignore. Breakingviews got started as a frenzy of optimism about new technology persuaded investors to ignore the conventional rules of finance in pursuit of future riches. The parallels with today's artificial intelligence-induced boom are all too evident. But the current excitement also evokes other exuberant periods. The vogue for erecting intricate financial structures on top of new-fangled assets, such as racks of Nvidia graphics chips, invites comparisons with the ramshackle innovations of the credit boom that collapsed in 2007. The rapid growth of private credit in recent years is another alarming analogy. |
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Meanwhile, the range of topics Breakingviews tackles has expanded with the changing world. Whereas our columnists once primarily zoomed in on deals and companies in Europe and the United States, they now track a far broader variety of subjects, from technology to trade policy. As governments meddle in corporate decision-making, cross-border M&A deals invariably have a geopolitical component. Look no further than the recent battle between pharma giants Pfizer and Novo Nordisk for Metsera, the biotech developing weight-loss drugs, which was settled by a decisive intervention from American antitrust cops. Our team has not only grown to more than 30 columnists and editors, but spread to eight cities around the world, enabling them to keep tabs on the latest developments in global industries from semiconductors to electric vehicles in real time. Our 25th anniversary recap threw up some prescient predictions. Back in 2011, one columnist accurately foresaw Apple, then worth $340 billion, becoming the world's first $1 trillion company. And in 2013, a Breakingviews calculator used non-sporting economic data to correctly forecast that Germany would lift soccer's World Cup six months later. Invariably, some dud calls crept in, too: the first Breakingviews column on bitcoin declared the nascent cryptocurrency's value "frothy" – at just $9. We will not make a habit of reminiscing, though. Indeed, the Breakingviews team is hard at work crafting predictions for 2026, in keeping with the preference of our readers to think about what's around the next corner, rather than what's in the rear-view mirror. Here's to the next 25 years. |
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Chart of the quarter-century |
For students of stock market history, the artificial intelligence-powered boom evokes the heights of the 2000 dotcom bubble. Yet that previous frenzy went far beyond a handful of tech stocks. At the end of 2000, the ranking of biggest companies by market value included old-economy stalwarts like General Electric, Exxon Mobil and Walmart. These days, Big Tech firms tower over the rest of the market while chip darling Nvidia is roughly 10 times as big as GE was 25 years ago. The S&P 500 Index, meanwhile, has risen fivefold. |
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We took our birthday celebrations into the podcast studio for a special edition of Viewsroom. Jeffrey Goldfarb, who combed through the archives to excavate 25 memorable columns, joined Aimee Donnellan, Jonathan Guilford and me for a discussion about what has changed and what has stayed the same in a quarter-century of financial insight. Over on The Big View I talked to Branko Milanovic, the economist who has focused on income inequality, about how China's rise sparked a political backlash against free trade. Drawing on his new book, "The Great Global Transformation", Branko explained why Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are more alike than they seem. |
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When China introduced a new multilateral bank in 2015, many – including me – were sceptical. The country's wasteful, debt-fuelled and corruption-driven construction boom seemed a shoddy foundation on which to build an infrastructure lender. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned countries to "make sure the governance is appropriate." Ten years on, however, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has defied those low expectations. It has lent alongside other multilateral institutions, upheld environmental standards, and built financial bridges with India at a time when the country's relations with China are strained. New President Zou Jiayi, who takes over in January, faces a new set of challenges, such as maintaining a multilateral ethos when the U.S. commitment to the World Bank and other organisations is in serious doubt. |
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Breakingviews is a premium commentary service, delivering agenda-setting financial insights in real time to corporate boardrooms and financial professionals on the most important events impacting global markets, companies, and economies. Not a subscriber? Breakingviews is a separate subscription to other services from Reuters. Get a free trial here. Listen to The Big View and Viewsroom podcasts. |
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