Bloomberg Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam pushed back against protester calls for the passage of US legislation that would require annual assessments of the city’s special trading status and allow sanctions on Chinese officials. “The Hong Kong government doesn’t agree on foreign parliaments passing bills to intervene in Hong Kong affairs, and we feel deep regret,” Lam told a regular ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s economic approval rating has dipped to 46 percent from 51 percent in July, as the majority of Americans fear a recession in the next year, a new Washington Post-ABC News polll finds. The survey shows some vulnerability in one of the Trump camp’s main arguments for re-election — that the US economy is strong — as ...

Bloomberg North Korea delivered a pointed message to the Trump administration — firing two “short-range projectiles” into its eastern seas hours after saying it was willing to restart nuclear talks with the US. The launches began shortly before 7 am local time on Tuesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. The incident came shortly after a top North Korean ...

Bloomberg After parliament blocked his Brexit strategy, and then refused to give him the election he wanted, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising to work for a deal with the European Union (EU). The British premier suffered his sixth consecutive defeat in a vote in the House of Commons, after his attempt to get approval for a snap poll ...

Bloomberg Bulgaria charged the head of a pro-Russian civil-society group with espionage, alleging he supplied information to help shift the Balkan nation’s geopolitical trajectory. The move could complicate ties between the two countries, which have remained cordial — particularly in the energy sector — despite Bulgaria’s membership of the European Union and NATO. In a possible sign of tougher rhetoric ...

Last week, the European Space Agency reached out to warn Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. that one of its satellites might collide with a SpaceX communications satellite. When ESA first raised such concerns in late August, the chances of a crash were 1 in 50,000; SpaceX had said then that it didn’t think the risk was high enough to ...

Hong Kong’s stock market is in need of support. While the Hang Seng Index rose the most in more than 10 months after Chief Executive Carrie Lam formally withdrew an extradition bill that sparked months of protests, the benchmark remains 5% lower than in mid-June before the turmoil started. The government should consider cutting the trading tax, or stamp duty, ...

The Business Roundtable touched off a storm of commentary with its abandonment of the “shareholder primacy” view that the goal of a for-profit business corporation should be to maximize shareholder value. Most people celebrating this move seem to think it means stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers and communities will do better if corporate boards and managers treat their interests ...

Investors who are optimistic about the outlook for the US economy and financial markets due to reports of healthy consumer spending, retail sales and an unemployment rate that held near a 50-year low in August need a history lesson. Even though consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of the economy, it was a poor predictor of the last two recessions, ...

Democracy, Winston Churchill once famously said, was the worst way to run a country “apart from all the others that have ever been tried.” Unfortunately, he did not make clear what kind of democracy he favoured. Britain’s dreadful Brexit impasse has divided the country into roughly equal camps, both convinced democracy has been traduced. And they both have a point. ...