Bloomberg If Singapore’s reputation for tight security was one reason the real Kim Jong-un agreed to hold his summit with Donald Trump in the city-state, the fake Kim Jong-un now knows why. A Hong Kong-based entertainer who impersonates the North Korean leader said he was detained at Changi Airport after returning to Singapore ahead of the summit on Tuesday. The ...

Bloomberg The anti-Brexit campaign group backed by billionaire George Soros called on British voters to pressure members of Parliament to force a referendum on the government’s divorce deal with the European Union. Best for Britain, which receives about 20 percent of its funding from Soros, wants a “national conversation” about Brexit and its effects to help trigger a second vote ...

Is President Trump’s pitch to disgruntled manufacturing workers a leading political indicator, portending future trends, or a lagging one, appealing to a small and declining segment of the public? We may be about to find out, thanks to Trump’s controversial tariff plan. Trump’s decision last week to levy duties on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico seems, ...

For all the talk of China’s mountain of debt, defaults and deleveraging, there’s a chasm nobody is talking about. Here’s an alarming and frequently cited statistic: Chinese industrial companies have at least $124 billion of debt maturing over the next two years. Actually, it’s worse. They have another $34 billion of bonds with put options – giving creditors the right ...

Never before has a US president worked so hard to isolate his country from its friends. The G-7 summit of advanced economies that started on Friday in Quebec sees Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK united in opposition to Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policy. The problem goes deeper than a first round of tariffs and counter-tariffs, because Trump’s ...

While the turmoil in Italy has died down, at least for now, the issue that set it off is sure to provoke more tumult ahead. The populist coalition that won the last election had proposed to make Paolo Savona, an economist who has said Italy should have a “Plan B” to exit the euro, finance minister. Sergio Mattarella, the country’s ...

When Narendra Modi took office as India’s prime minister just over four years ago, a top priority for the economic reformers who had supported his candidacy was the privatization of India’s incredibly inefficient public sector. Among their biggest targets was the state-run airline, Air India — a clunky, loss-making behemoth that has long been rendered irrelevant by buzzy domestic competitors. ...

Imagine you run a hotel group that’s just sold a controlling stake in its property portfolio so it can pursue a fashionable “asset-light” strategy. What’s the most logical way to deploy some of the 4.6 billion euros ($5.4 billion) of capital released by that transaction to maximize investor returns? Maybe not buying a chunky stake in a strike-prone, heavily indebted, ...

It doesn’t feel all that long ago that Australian banks were the envy of the world. In March 2009, when stress-testing of US financial institutions drove the final spasm of the previous year’s credit crisis, you could have bought all the shares in Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Barclays Plc with their $8.4 trillion of gross ...

Bloomberg Uber Technologies Inc. announced it would roll out its on-demand electric-bicycle service to Europe, as it seeks to expand its international offerings to include more environmentally-friendly forms of transportation. Uber said it aims to bring its Jump bike rental service to Berlin before the end of this summer, with other European cities to follow soon after. “When you get ...