Mercury is a noxious byproduct of burning coal. It contaminates fish and, in turn, people, leading to brain damage in infants and small children, as well as serious cardiovascular and central nervous system problems in adults. Restrictions on US power plants have substantially reduced their emissions of mercury since 2015. Apparently, the Trump administration has a problem with that. Specifically, ...

There’s no economic crisis in China. There is a slowdown. That can be a good thing. Yes, China is the second-largest economy and deeply enmeshed in the planet’s commercial map. That’s all the more reason it needs to keep becoming a more normal economy, with a more mature pace of growth. That will increasingly be driven by consumers and technology, ...

Corporate tax cuts were basically the last hope for supply-side economics. This economic doctrine, which became popular in the 1980s, holds that taxes distort the economy a great deal, and that cutting taxes therefore produces big gains in growth. Those gains are assumed to eventually result in higher wages for workers, leading some to derisively label the idea as trickle-down ...

The market for initial public offerings (IPO) had been giving off warning signals long before this week’s rout in global stocks. The two are connected — and the human investors had a lead over the robot traders. London saw two big IPO disappointments which happened to be divisive stocks with strong bear cases. Online lender Funding Circle Holdings Plc, down ...

Indian retail investors won’t easily forgive their fund managers, nor will they quickly forget this wealth destruction. Out of 416 open-ended, onshore equity funds, 401 have lost money this year. Tech funds, the only ones to have performed decently, have been helped by Asia’s worst-performing currency of 2018. And that’s only because Indian software exporters earn revenues in a strong ...

Bloomberg You could write it off as a fluke in February. When it happened again in March, people got concerned. Now stocks are tumbling a third time in 2018, and investors are starting to sense something has changed. A smattering of 3 percent plunges may not make a bear market, but it sure is a break from the past, which ...

Bloomberg Short sellers who have been avoiding Europe have missed out on profiting from the slide in equity markets that has left investors around the world jittery. The benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 Index has fell 3.6 percent in the two trading sessions, dropping to levels last seen in late 2016. At the same time, the overall level of bearish bets ...

Bloomberg The winter holidays might not be so miserable after all for stock investors. So say Morgan Stanley strategists, whose warning about a “rolling bear market” seemed to pay off this week after growth stocks led a slide in equities. While underperformance in growth shares will likely persist, stocks may rally before year-end amid cheaper valuations, a supportive earnings season ...

Bloomberg China’s central bank is considering a range of risks in its currency policy, including a worst-case scenario, Governor Yi Gang said. As the yuan inches closer to the psychologically important level of 7 per dollar amid rising trade tensions with the US, the People’s Bank of China governor told Bloomberg in an exclusive interview that the Chinese currency is ...

Bloomberg Kazakhstan’s central bank has a range of options besides changing its key interest rate as it looks to fine-tune monetary policy after markets stabilized and inflation came in below expectations, according to Governor Daniyar Akishev. With the benchmark held twice at 9 percent after four cuts and anticipation building that a hike is on the way, Akishev said “the ...