Bloomberg Chinese companies signed a combined $57.83 billion worth of intended one-year deals at the country’s first import fair this week, China Central Television reported, as the government seeks to boost demand for foreign goods amid trade tension with the US. Agreements to buy goods and services were signed by firms among the more than 3,600 exhibitors at the China ...

Bloomberg Singapore lashed out at Facebook Inc., calling the social media giant unreliable after it declined a request to remove a post that linked Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the city state with 1MDB allegations. Facebook’s decision to not remove malicious information on Singapore shows the need for legislation, the Ministry of Law said in a statement. The government ...

Bloomberg China signed accords with Kenya that will allow access for farm produce from the East African nation, a presidential aide said. “After a week of delicate negotiations, formal sanitary and phytosanitary agreements have been signed between Kenya and China for Kenya’s agricultural produce to enter the Chinese market,” the president’s chief of staff, Nzioka Waita, said on Twitter. Kenya ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc. is betting that stores of the future won’t have any clerks or registers. A company in Japan thinks it can get there first. Signpost Corp., which has a staff of about 100, has already deployed its technology in a kiosk on the platform of a train station in Tokyo. It’s an ideal testing ground: a small space ...

Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s desire to nurture more “global players” has turned Berlin’s gaze towards Brussels and to reshaping European Union rules that clamp down on mergers and technology giants. Merkel, facing her final years as German leader, has criticised the EU for focussing too much on competition in narrow European national markets at the expense of the bigger ...

Bloomberg Telecom Italia SpA’s board of directors may seek the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Amos Genish as early as this week, Il Messaggero newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information. Directors backed by both Vivendi SA, the carrier’s biggest shareholder, and US activist Elliott Management Corp., which owns the second-largest stake, have agreed to call an extraordinary ...

Bloomberg Argentina’s deepening recession will continue through the first quarter before the economy sees a sustained and gradual recovery, the International Monetary Fund said, while outlining a long list of threats to that rebound. “The bottom — the floor — is going to be in the first quarter,” mission chief Roberto Cardarelli told journalists in Buenos Aires. “We believe the ...

Bloomberg All-male boards at the UK’s biggest companies are nearing extinction, a sign that government efforts to increase gender parity are paying off. Just five companies in the FTSE 350 Index have no women at the top table, down from eight in 2017, according to data from the annual Hampton-Alexander Review that will be released in full on Tuesday. The ...

Bloomberg US consumer debt posted the smallest increase in three months as credit-card loans fell, suggesting Americans had limited appetite to spend beyond their means, Federal Reserve figures showed. Total credit rose $10.9 billion in September from the prior month, compared with the median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg survey for a $15 billion increase. That followed an upwardly ...

One lesson of the midterm elections is that economic growth is losing its power to unite the country and to reduce explosive conflicts over race, religion, ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality. This is unfamiliar. Economic progress has been a routine part of our election narratives. The presumption is that a strong economy favours the incumbent party and a weak economy ...