Last week, the Senate passed a measure that would allot $10 billion over five years for Nasa to develop two new lunar landers. Buried in a nearly $250 billion bill intended to boost innovation, the measure was equal to about 43% of the space agency’s total budget. Why the extravagance? On one level, it surely makes sense to build a ...

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd didn’t hide its frustration when turning away from Hong Kong in 2013 and choosing to list in the US instead. “The question Hong Kong must address is whether it is ready to look forward as the rest of the world passes it by,” co-founder Joe Tsai wrote in a blog post that chastised the city’s exchange ...

Consider the hedge fund manager’s dilemma. If all she has is $200 million to $300 million in assets under management, she’d barely be able to afford that swanky office and the half-dozen analysts she’d need to run the operation. So she works hard to establish a track record and begins to manage, say, $2 billion to $3 billion. At that ...

Federal Reserve officials, confronting developments and an outlook they seem to have not anticipated, face tricky decisions as they finalised their policy deliberations on Wednesday. These centre on updating their individual projections and converging on whether — and if yes, how — to start a necessary policy pivot that unfortunately conflicts with the framework the central bank adopted recently to ...

Bloomberg Seven of the European Union’s leading energy producers called on policymakers to agree to an ambitious and fast reform of the world’s largest carbon market in a bid to help investors in the transition to climate neutrality. Companies including Electricite de France SA, Statkraft AS and Fortum Oyj — which have big nuclear and hydropower fleets — want a ...

Bloomberg Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin concluded their first summit in the Swiss city of Geneva on Wednesday after about 2.5 hours of meetings, seeking to dial back tensions between the two former Cold War adversaries that have reached the highest level in years. The summit was substantially shorter than aides had predicted. US officials said they expected the ...

Bloomberg Clement Beaune, France’s junior European Affairs minister and key ally of President Emmanuel Macron, warned that the European Union will take action if the UK leaves the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit agreement. “We wouldn’t be happy to do it, but we would be ready to do it and respond,” Beaune said in an interview on the sidelines ...

Bloomberg Algeria’s former ruling party won the most seats in parliamentary elections as all-time low turnout showed deep skepticism over promises of a “new Algeria” after two years of unrest in the Opec member. Participation was about 23% in the vote, which delivered 105 of 407 parliamentary seats to the National Liberation Front (FLN) after protesters and more than a ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s king has urged parliament to reconvene as soon as possible amid growing public anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic that has left democracy suspended all year. The statement from the national palace on Wednesday followed a meeting of the country’s royal leaders chaired by King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad and comes as daily Covid-19 infections averaged ...

Bloomberg North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said the country’s food situation is “getting tense” due to typhoons last year that wiped out crops, comments that underscored farm-sector shortfalls made worse by his decision to close borders to prevent Covid. Kim told a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of his ruling Workers’ Party of Korea “the agricultural sector failed to ...