Bloomberg Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is considering easing lending rules for shadow banks, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would give the cash-starved financiers access to funds. Modi’s cabinet is likely to discuss allowing state banks to provide so-called credit enhancement against securities rated BBB+ to non bank financiers, the people said, asking not ...

Bloomberg The use of ride-hailing apps is declining in China as operators scale back incentives for drivers, contributing to the slowdown in car sales in the world’s biggest auto market, according to a Sanford C Bernstein report. Total daily active usage across ride-hailing apps in the third quarter fell 6.3% from a year earlier, marking a fifth consecutive quarterly drop, ...

Bloomberg Indonesia is touting an abundance of low-cost renewable energy to lure billions of dollars in investment Southeast Asia’s largest economy needs to build processing plants for commodities such as nickel, copper and aluminum. The commodity powerhouse has potential to develop 33,000 megawatts of hydro power and 29,000 megawatts of geothermal energy at costs as low as 2-4 cents per ...

Bloomberg For some money managers, closing a $100 million fund would be akin to reeling in a big fish. For Rob Kaplan, it’s just the bait. Kaplan, a former Walmart Inc executive, plans to invest the $106 million he’s raised from some of the world’s biggest plastics makers in companies that promise to prevent trash from ending up in the ...

Elizabeth Warren was supposed to be the thinking person’s Bernie Sanders, impeccably progressive but with realistic arithmetic connecting aspirations to resources. Then came her explanation of how she would finance “Medicare for All.” Before Republicans wearied of pretending to care about fiscal rectitude, they pretended that they could eliminate budget deficits by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” a pledge that ...

On London’s Oxford Street, you could almost forget we were in the midst of a retail apocalypse. Christmas lights and a slew of special offers marking an ever earlier start to the imported bargain frenzy, Black Friday, brought out the crowds. Similar holiday cheer and promotions have spread elsewhere in Europe too. But European retailers face a new worry: shoppers ...

Local news is in steep decline. A recent report from Pen America finds that the US has lost more than 1,800 newspapers since 2004. The consequences include a decline in civic engagement and an increase in corruption. The report mentions how government officials in Bell, California, a city without a newspaper, were able to get rid of caps on their ...

With India’s growth tumbling to 4.5% from 8.1% in little more than a year, you’d be surprised to know that Shaktikanta Das has one of the easiest jobs in central banking. He just has to keep doing what he’s been doing since becoming governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last December: cut interest rates. Fortunately, political will is ...

Reading Susan Rice’s new memoir, “Tough Love,” is a reminder of two things: what a remarkably gifted, subtle and perhaps tragic man President Obama was; and how people like Rice who served him endured ceaseless public attacks in a country that was already on the ragged edge, though we didn’t yet know it. Washington memoirs are most valuable for the ...

Three years ago Tidjane Thiam stirred hopes that the banking industry was looking at new ways to tackle its bloated cost base. The chief executive officer of Credit Suisse Group AG said his company was working on a common platform with another lender to share expenses. The project has made little visible progress since then, and it’s not because the ...