Bloomberg President Joe Biden’s administration is setting up its trade policy to prioritise enforcement of existing commitments by the US’s partners over negotiating more deals to open new export markets. Biden’s likely strategy for supporting American producers focuses on going after violations via dialogue, work with allies and use of dispute-resolution mechanisms in existing trade agreements rather than following the ...

Bloomberg Russian prosecutors demanded opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s imprisonment, a day after police detained record numbers of protesters against President Vladimir Putin for a second straight weekend. The Prosecutor General’s Office said on Monday it agreed with the Federal Penitentiary Service that Navalny had repeatedly violated the conditions of a suspended 3 1/2 year sentence for fraud and should receive ...

Bloomberg Talks aimed at building support for a new Italian government pushed ahead with a deadline in sight, after consultations failed to produce a deal to end the deadlock that forced Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to resign. Roberto Fico, the lower-house speaker tasked with sounding out parties, said Sunday afternoon that discussions with the forces from the outgoing coalition would ...

Bloomberg Former South African President Jacob Zuma said he will flout an order by the nation’s top court by refusing to cooperate with a judicial panel that’s probing graft during his rule, and dared the authorities to arrest him. “The Commission Into Allegations of State Capture can expect no further cooperation from me in any of their processes,” Zuma said ...

Bloomberg The European Union (EU) is seeking to overturn Apple Inc.’s victory in a 13 billion-euro ($15.8 billion) tax dispute, saying judges used “contradictory reasoning” when they found that the company’s Irish units weren’t liable for huge payments. A summary of the appeal published on Monday shows the EU’s determination to challenge the critical July court judgment. The decision was ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden withdrew all the spending cuts proposed by former President Donald Trump during his final days in office. Biden said in a letter to Congress that he was reversing all 73 spending cuts that Trump had requested, which touched virtually every cabinet-level agency as well as federal programs such as the National Endowments of the Arts and ...

Bloomberg Argentina’s Salta province reached a deal with an ad-hoc creditors group for amendments to its foreign bonds due in 2024, the provincial government said in a statement. The bondholders group, represented by VR Advisory Services Ltd., holds roughly 40% of the notes. Salta owes $350 million of debt it issued in 2016, which trades at distressed levels with yields ...

Bloomberg UK lenders approved more mortgages in 2020 than in any year since before the financial crisis, as house hunters sought to take advantage of a temporary tax cut. The stamp duty holiday, which allows buyers to save as much as 15,000 pounds propelled the housing market into high gear even as the coronavirus crisis sent the wider economy into ...

Bloomberg US consumer sentiment edged lower in late January, adding to signs that consumers remain subdued about prospects for the economic recovery as the pandemic wears on. The University of Michigan’s final sentiment index falls to 79 from a preliminary reading of 79.2 earlier in the month and 80.7 in December, data showed. The figure fell below the 79.4 median ...

Bloomberg Italian manufacturing is picking up at the fastest pace in nearly three years, a bright spot in an economy that probably shrank close to 10% during the 2020 pandemic. Factories, mostly located in the country’s north, saw a sustained upturn in output in January, with orders expanding at a solid pace thanks to demand from Europe and North America, ...