Lionel Laurent

The bursting of social media’s ad-funded bubble is creating big market waves. Meta Platforms Inc. is less valuable than Home Depot Inc., Snap Inc. is worth less than Deutsche Bank AG (which underwrote its IPO), and Twitter is now privately owned by Elon Musk after almost a decade of cumulative…

The European “way of life” has always been a vague concept, but — after Covid-19 — it chimed with a new generation looking for la dolce vita. Citigroup Inc. is one unlikely poster child. At its new office in Malaga, Spain, junior bankers can expect to be paid half the salary of their London…

Liz Truss isn’t Boris Johnson. That was the main crumb of comfort for European Union diplomats and leaders as congratulations from Paris to Helsinki flowed to the new resident of 10 Downing Street. After years of Johnson’s antics, from threats over post-Brexit trade to calling the French “turds,”…

“Unbearable.” That’s how a member of Finland’s parliament describes the sight of Russian tourists pouring across the border, stocking up on souvenirs while Vladimir Putin’s army bombs Ukraine. Worse, the fact that some of the tourists travel on into the European Union’s visa-free Schengen zone…

SoftBank Group Corp. Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son and Credit Suisse AG Chairman Axel Lehmann doubtless wish their respective firms had never met disgraced financier Lex Greensill. But hopefully they — and the finance industry at large — can learn lessons from the scandal that ensued. …

Does an industrial-sized dog whistle go off when advocates boast about cryptocurrency’s ability to evade US government sanctions? Back in March, a founder of Tornado Cash — a so-called “mixer” service that masks cryptocurrency transactions by mixing them with others — told Bloomberg it would be …

A few days ago, Coinbase Global Inc.’s top lawyer issued an unequivocal rejection of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegations that digital tokens it offers its customers were, in fact, unregistered securities. “Coinbase does not list securities,” Paul Grewal wrote in a blog post. …

MicroStrategy Inc. is two things: a publicly listed enterprise-software company whose annual revenue has barely budged in five years, and a publicly listed Bitcoin trading vehicle that has borrowed money to buy volatile cryptocurrency and lost a cumulative $2 billion in the process. The results…

The smell of natural gas rarely gets thought of as a recession risk in Europe. Yet International Monetary Fund researchers this week listed exactly that as one of several potential bottlenecks that could aggravate the pain of a major European Union gas supply crisis, as seemingly small…

It’s the summer calm before the winter storm in Europe. Tourists are back in Paris, Madrid and Rome, but they can’t save the Old Continent from the threat of recession. Strikes and staff shortages give a hint of the high inflation eating into people’s pockets -- and darkening their mood. France…