Bloomberg Pinterest Inc.’s message to investors was don’t compare us to social media or a search engine. The outcome was that it raised about $1.4 billion in an above-range initial public offering. Pinterest operates in a crowded digital marketing space, where Google and Facebook Inc. get the lion’s share of ad dollars, and a smattering of smaller platforms like Twitter ...

Bloomberg UK house prices stagnated in March as the number of transactions plunged, according to LSL Acadata. Values were flat on an annual basis last month as falls in London and southern England offset gains elsewhere, the firm said in a report. In March alone, prices rose just 0.1 percent, and transactions fell a seasonally-adjusted 15 percent, despite the month ...

Bloomberg US new-home construction unexpectedly fell in March, decelerating to the slowest pace since May 2017 and suggesting builders remain wary even as lower mortgage rates and steady wage gains offer support to consumers. Residential starts fell 0.3 percent to a 1.139 million annualised rate after a downwardly revised 1.142 million pace in the prior month, according to government figures ...

In the rebalancing of Sino-American relations that’s underway, the usual roles are reversed: China’s normally deft President Xi Jinping appears to have badly overreached in seeking advantage. And President Trump, who often seems tone-deaf on foreign policy, is riding a bipartisan consensus that it’s time to push back against Beijing. The two nations will probably make a trade deal soon, ...

Whisper it quietly, but the worst may be over for the euro zone economy. After months of gloom, and with analysts wondering whether Europe was heading for a recession, the industrial sector shows signs of stabilising. The slight revival will please the European Central Bank (ECB), which is considering whether to double down on its monetary easing as it struggles ...

President Donald Trump, who has received unprecedented support from America’s gun lobby, seems determined to make it easier to export firearms and harder to keep track of whether they’re destined for terrorists or rogue regimes. He proposes to do this by shifting oversight of the export of semi-automatic and non-automatic firearms, as well as of various gun components and some ...

Almost 10 years after the Great Recession ended, the growing threat of a new economic slowdown raises a troubling question: When the next recession strikes, what can the world’s central banks do? With interest rates low and their balance sheets still loaded with assets bought to fight the 2008 crisis, do they have the tools to respond? The Great Recession ...

As nearly a billion Indians are going to the polls this month and next, no one doubts jobs will be central to their vote. We just can’t agree on whether the employment picture is rosy or dark. While the government cites payroll data to claim significant job creation, the opposition holds up a leaked preliminary report that pegged unemployment in ...

BlackRock used to be able to skip over market mayhem. Now it seems as if the ground is shifting under it. The S&P 500 Index rose 13% in first quarter, a big snap back from 2018, when it was down 6%. BlackRock’s earnings did fall last year, but world’s largest asset-management firm was still able to produce a relatively impressive ...

It’s hard to find anyone who is, at least publicly, in favour of Deutsche Bank AG’s merger with Commerzbank AG. Even one adviser on the deal privately acknowledged what most observers suspect: putting together the two ailing German banks will only create a bigger lender with exactly the same problems. That’s not exactly an endorsement of what would be Europe’s ...