Bloomberg A weakening Hurricane Lane has brought record rainfall to Hawaii, where flooding threatens $8 billion worth of homes. In 12 hours, 16.48 inches of rain fell on the Big Island of Hawaii, and daily records were set at Hilo International Airport on Wednesday and on Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Roads on the Big Island have been washed ...

Bloomberg Walmart Inc. has asked its cosmetics suppliers to consider sourcing their goods in countries outside of China, one of the first signs that the world’s largest retailer hopes to dilute the impact of the Trump administration’s looming tariffs. A “large amount” of items in the cosmetics category fall under the most-recent proposed levies on Chinese goods, according to an ...

Inflation is back. What do we do about it? For starters: Don’t ignore it. The latest consumer price index (CPI) — the government’s best-known inflation indicator — reported a 2.9 percent increase from July 2017. The last time the year-over-year gain was higher was in December 2011. Though hardly a cause for panic, it suggests intensifying price and wage pressures ...

Analysts are trying urgently to evaluate the potential impact of a full-fledged trade war on the Chinese economy. This typically involves estimating how much various tariff scenarios will reduce China’s GDP growth, with current estimates ranging from the minimal, 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points, to the substantial — 2 percentage points. This is probably the right way to evaluate the ...

Getting two management teams to agree on a deal to create the world’s largest industrial gases group was hard enough. Finalising the combination of Praxair Inc and Linde AG is proving harder still. The former, in particular, should be asking if the benefits really are worth it. The possibility of a transaction surfaced in August 2016. An agreement to create ...

Global investors are positioned for a coordinated tightening of monetary policy by the world’s major central banks. Although the US Federal Reserve is already far down that path, the others are just getting started. The European Central Bank is set to end its bond purchase program by year-end. The Bank of England is leaning towards hiking interest rates for only ...

As negotiators from the UK and the European Union meet in Brussels, Brexit is said to be entering its endgame. This isn’t an ordinary endgame though: All the major pieces are still on the board and pretty much the full range of potential outcomes — from no deal to no Brexit, and everything in between — remain live possibilities. Mapping ...

Which are the most lucrative airline routes? The ones that fly tourists and executives between global capitals on sparkling new planes, accompanied by in-flight movies and lie-flat beds? Or the ones that hop around the boondocks on ancient turboprops with the seat stuffing coming out? Of course it’s the latter. Every business knows that you can charge the highest prices ...

What exactly has gone wrong, and when and why? The open, democratic world order based on egalitarian rights and the rule of law — liberalism, for lack of a better term — is under increasing pressure. The signs, serious and less so, are everywhere. The trend has now hit so many nations that the explanation has to be global. Social ...

Bloomberg Elon Musk scrapped his plan to take Tesla Inc. private, a remarkable reversal more than two weeks after blindsiding employees and investors with the idea in a bombshell tweet. In a blog post, Tesla’s chairman, CEO and largest shareholder said he had met with the board and “let them know that I believe the better path is for Tesla ...