Bloomberg Brazil has confirmed the first coronavirus case in Latin America and will announce it shortly at a press conference, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. A 61-year-old Brazilian who recently travelled to Northern Italy for work tested positive in a preliminary test, the Health Ministry said in a statement. A second round of tests have ...

We are going to have this argument repeatedly between now and Election Day: Who gave us this lengthy economic expansion, which is now in its 11th year and is the longest in American history? Is it President Trump and his economists, who claim that their policies — tax cuts, deregulation, trade agreements — have restored dynamic growth? Or is it ...

Bitcoin is back, sort of. The original cryptocurrency hasn’t regained the lofty highs of its bubble peak in late 2017, but it has climbed back up to about $10,000. Predictions that Bitcoin would collapse have not borne fruit. Despite its bubbles and crashes, the cryptocurrency is now a semi-permanent feature of the global financial landscape. What it is not, however, ...

Dan Loeb’s Third Point LLC says it has a history of working constructively with boards to promote the success of their companies. The activist’s latest goal seems to involve removing the board of Prudential Plc entirely, and dismantling the head office around it, as part of a breakup of the $48 billion insurer. That may not be as hard as ...

The yield on a 30-year USTreasury bond has finally fallen to a record low of 1.83%, having dropped a staggering 50 basis points this year already. With the coronavirus outbreak forcing people to look for havens, there are few signs that this investor frenzy for long-maturity sovereign debt is going to abate anytime soon. The US appears to be headed ...

For a time, it looked like our defenses might hold. The extraordinary lockdown of China’s Hubei province over the past month had at times appeared to be halting the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. For much of that period, new cases outside China were running at just a dozen or so a day, most of them with clear connections back ...

A decision by Thailand’s constitutional court to ban the second-largest opposition party should be a boost for Prayuth Chan-Ocha, junta leader turned elected prime minister. Future Forward’s leaders were among his highest-profile critics. Yet the long sought-after victory looks Pyrrhic. The former general’s problems have been piling up. Thailand’s flatlining economy, already suffering from the worst drought in decades, is ...

It’s long been obvious that one of Germany’s formerly grand centrist parties, the left-leaning SPD, is in decline. But another and even grander centrist bloc, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel, had hopes of avoiding that fate, by defending the hallowed middle ground in politics. Suddenly, though, Germany is having a full-bore political crisis of centrism. Since ...

Bloomberg Stocks dropped globally and US index futures fluctuated on Wednesday as investors fretted fresh evidence of the widening coronavirus outbreak. Gold advanced and Treasuries were steady. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index fell for a fifth straight session, suffering its longest losing streak since July, as companies including Diageo Plc and Danone SA warned the virus outbreak will hit their ...

Bloomberg Thailand confirmed three more novel coronavirus cases, taking the country’s total to 40, and said it will step up efforts to contain the disease. The stock market slumped the most since 2014. The new cases are in one family and include two people who returned from Hokkaido in Japan and are thought to have contracted the illness there, Permanent ...