Bloomberg Swedes became more pessimistic as the central bank prepares to raise interest rates for the first time in seven years and politicians struggle to form a government more than a month after the nation’s inconclusive election. The economic tendency indicator fell to 108.0 in October from 111.2 in September, the National Institute of Economic Research said. Analysts surveyed by ...

Globalisation strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship. For decades, promoting startup firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, ...

BT Group Plc’s pick to replace its boss Gavin Patterson, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co., is Philip Jansen, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co. Indeed, it was Jansen – currently co-CEO at Worldpay Inc. – who first brought Patterson into the telecoms world, hiring him at the turn of the millennium for a ...

For a long time, bankers’ concerns about the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) didn’t seem to have much effect on London’s role as a global financial hub. That might be changing. One measure of London’s prominence is the amount of international lending that originates in the UK. A German bank, for example, might provide financing to an Irish ...

What’s the most important bit of infrastructure to connect an international metropolis like China’s Pearl River Delta? A demolished border post. For all the excitement around the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge last week, that’s probably the best lesson to draw from Beijing’s plan to draw Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan and other cities into a single megalopolis. ...

As Italy digs in to resist European Union (EU) demands for budget moderation, some investors say only one thing can reverse the government’s spiraling borrowing costs: the collapse of the populist administration. The coalition’s determination to ramp up spending has pushed the yield on Italian bonds to highs not seen since the euro-area debt crisis. As long as the nation’s ...

Boeing Co. is a bright spot in a rough week for industrial earnings. The planemaker reported better-than-expected third-quarter results, and raised its guidance for 2018 adjusted profit. Boeing also maintained its goal of delivering 810 to 815 commercial airplanes this year, easing pre-earnings jitters over a relatively weak shipping rate in the third quarter. That should provide confidence that bottlenecks ...

Given recent market turmoil, it would easy to overlook the upcoming IPO of Niu Technologies, a Chinese manufacturer of electric mopeds. The $95 million the company plans to raise is a pittance compared to the billions burnt by Tesla Inc. But, the technologies developed by Niu and other pioneers of electric two-wheel vehicles will transform transportation as much as anything ...

Bloomberg The staggering growth of cloud computing can’t go on forever. And reports from tech companies that make data-center hardware and sell the services suggest the industry’s expansion is cooling. Western Digital Corp., a maker of memory chips, neatly listed everything that is suddenly wrong with the technology industry when it gave a disappointing forecast. A boom in spending by ...

Bloomberg In Haidilao International Holding Ltd.’s hotpot restaurants, robots are replacing chefs and waiters. Asia’s biggest listed restaurant chain by market value is partnering with Japan’s Panasonic Corp. to open what the two companies say is the world’s first eatery with a fully automated kitchen on October 28 in Beijing. At the new Haidilao restaurant, robots will take orders, prepare ...