Bloomberg Chinese state media gave one of its strongest warnings yet of a possible military intervention in Hong Kong, even though analysts said such a move remained a last resort. The unsigned commentary from the official Xinhua News Agency on Sunday came after the 12th straight weekend of unrest in Asia’s main financial hub, with violent clashes that saw demonstrators ...

Bloomberg Attempts to avoid a snap election in Italy are now riding on the future of caretaker Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, as a deadline to reach a deal nears. Whether or not Conte stays in his job to lead a new alliance has become the main sticking point in talks between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic ...

It’s getting harder and harder to write these budget columns, because it must be obvious to almost everyone by now that hardly anyone in Washington (or perh-aps any place) cares ab-out the budget deficits. The assumption is that we can raise spending and cut taxes forever — or until some crisis occurs that forces us to do involuntarily what we ...

If you are searching for the EU’s next bad idea, look no further than the “European Future Fund.” The 100 billion euro ($110 billion) pot, first reported in Politico, would be a way to boost strategic sectors which are seen as lagging behind China and the US. It’s not a formal policy plan, and the details are still scanty. But ...

The growing consensus is that even with all the trade tensions wreaking havoc in markets and global supply chains, as long as consumers stay resilient, the US will probably avoid recession. But a big enough decline in business investment —prompted by trade tensions and global manufacturing weakness — could be enough to create layoffs and dent consumption. So that’s the ...

Donald Trump is an unpopular president. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, only 43.3 percent of Americans approve of his performance. FiveThirtyEight, which weights polls by quality, sample size and partisan lean, puts the average at 41.6 percent. But as the president meets with leaders of the other G7 countries in the French resort city of Biarritz, he ...

The fires currently consuming Brazil’s Amazon rainforest seem a world away from the tense diplomacy in the US trade war with China. In truth, they’re more closely connected than you might suspect. One of Beijing’s main acts of retaliation in the fight has been to freeze purchases of the 30 million metric tons to 40 million tons of American soybeans ...

Who knew the work of disciplined inventory and expense management could get Wall Street this excited? Or, at least that’s what I think is driving a surge in shares of Nordstrom Inc., which reported second-quarter earnings. The retailer beat analysts’ earnings per share estimates, an outcome it chalked up to deft expense control. But, to my mind, practically everything else ...

When he failed to ignite a continental uprising against South America’s 19th-century colonial masters, Simon Bolivar was crestfallen. “He who serves the revolution plows the seas,” he despaired. Happily, Bolivar got it backward. From the Yucatan Peninsula to the Strait of Magellan, aquaculture is revolutionising food production. Plowing the oceans and inland waters, Latin America and the Caribbean expanded more ...

Bloomberg US equity-index futures turned higher along with shares in Europe after a down session in Asia on Monday as investors assessed the latest developments in the Sino-American trade war. The dollar strengthened. Contracts on all three main US equity indexes rose after President Donald Trump said that prospects for a deal with China were better now than at any ...