Bloomberg Volkswagen AG’s plan to review options for its Lamborghini supercar division marks a further step in Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess’s campaign to transform the world’s biggest automaker and more than double its market value. The German manufacturer is weighing a potential sale or stock listing for the Italian brand, according to people familiar with the matter, as Diess ...

Bloomberg British financial advisers and pension managers face jail and increased fines under proposed legislation announced during the Queen’s Speech to mark the new parliamentary term. Penalties for the most serious offenses will carry a maximum sentence of seven years and a $1.26 million fine, according to a briefing note that accompanied a speech read by the Queen to UK ...

One word — “pathway” — is all it took to send the British pound rocketing against the US dollar. It had been a dire week in Brexit-land, with Boris Johnson’s do-or-die tactics failing to persuade the European Union (EU) to accept his new proposal on the Irish border. But suddenly came the surprising news that a meeting between the British ...

Big pieces of economic legislation tend to unleash the full power of unintended consequences. Consider Sarbanes-Oxley, the bipartisan law passed in 2002 in the wake of the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. It did what it was intended to do, which was ensure companies gave accurate accounts of their finances. But it has also led to debacles ...

Australia is still a continent, but it’s no longer an island. The country that was once immune to business cycles is being sucked deeper into the vortex of global monetary easing. That’s a measure of how pronounced and far-reaching the world economy’s downdraft has become. The Reserve Bank of Australia used to follow the US Federal Reserve in its monetary ...

For years governments have been discussing how to bring century-old international tax rules into line with modern business practices. A new proposal developed at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a think tank backed by industrial-country governments, is a big step forward. Under existing rules, multinationals have great leeway to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, with little regard ...

As Germany prepares to pass its climate protection plan through 2030, the government is trying to decide whether to prioritise solar or wind energy. The latest version of the plan leans towards solar, and that makes economic sense, but it also represents something of an unwelcome turnabout for the existing renewables industry, which is mostly wind-focused. In the most recent ...

The heated auction between buyout firm Bain Capital and Austria’s AMS AG for the German LED-maker Osram Licht AG has ended in no deal. The prospect of a transaction being rekindled in the near term looks bleak — though not impossible over the longer run. It beggars belief that a tense round of bidding can culminate in no more than ...

A common refrain you hear in India is, “There’s no credit in the market.” The despondence cuts across industries as diverse as real estate, autos and road construction. An 88% slump in the flow of funds to the commercial sector between April and September shows that the producers’ unease is justified. However, one credit tap is starting to gurgle, giving ...

Bloomberg US equity futures dropped alongside stocks in Europe after China appeared to pour cold water on a partial trade deal touted by Donald Trump, saying it wanted to iron out details before signing it. European bonds gained. Contracts on the three main equity indexes signalled US stocks may run out of steam after the S&P 500 rose to within ...