Bloomberg The UK’s biggest bond mutual fund is shifting money to the other side of the Atlantic as the interest-rate gap between Europe and the US widens to record levels. M&G Limited has boosted US holdings in its 23.4 billion pound ($32 billion) Optimal Income Fund this year to more than a third at the expense of positions in French, ...

Bloomberg Brookfield Asset Management Inc. offered A$4.35 billion ($3.3 billion) for Australian hospital operator Healthscope Ltd., topping a bid from private equity firm BGH Capital. The Canadian asset manager offered A$2.50 a share in cash, Healthscope said on Monday. That’s 23 percent more than the stock price on April 24, before BGH’s offer was disclosed. Healthscope said it will assess ...

Bloomberg Suitsupply is suiting up for expansion. The Dutch menswear seller may not yet be a household name outside of the millennial circuit, but it’s spending heavily to change that. It’s gone on a hiring spree to fill its senior ranks — including former executives from Bank of America to Tory Burch — and mapped out a plan for international ...

Is the US better off trying to sape the world as party to an imperfect international accord, or as an outsider insisting on better terms? One lesson from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 ought to be: Rejecting ideas from allies merely opens the door to alternatives over which the US will have zero control. This wisdom is newly relevant, ...

In the late 18th century, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about the existence of a “social contract” between citizens and the government. A similarly unwritten set of rules exists between generations: Children promise they’ll take care of their parents, because they expect to be treated the same in the future. A new report by the Intergenerational Commission, a group of ...

UK house prices fell the most in eight years in April. That hasn’t stopped the parent company of shouty British tabloid the Daily Mail securing a 14-fold return from the property industry. Daily Mail & General Trust Plc says it will have pocketed 890 million pounds ($1.2 billion) from its 30 percent stake in ZPG Plc – owner of popular ...

The best reality TV show in Australia right now is the televised hearings of the Royal Commission into Australian banks. The formal public inquiry, led by a retired judge with broad coercive powers, has uncovered a litany of wrongdoing including bribery and fraud rings, poor lending practices, and pervasive lying to regulators. The most startling revelations relate to financial planning ...

As scientific terms go, ‘climate change’ is failing. Good terms are specific, descriptive and help people to understand complex concepts. Climate change is ambiguous, referring perhaps to the most pressing human-generated environmental problem of the century, or to other kinds of changes that happen through natural forces and have been going on since long before humans arose. Last week I ...

Banks have become too safe. That is a chief justification cited by lawmakers to roll back the Dodd-Frank banking regulations and loosen other financial rules. The Senate passed a bill in March, and Speaker Paul Ryan said earlier this week that he had a deal to push the measure through the House. But at least one layer of protection that ...

Germany’s new government is composed of the same two parties as its previous one, but many in Germany and outside expected one major change: more government spending. Olaf Scholz, the new finance minister, comes from the Social Democratic Party, which heavily campaigned on a promise of more investment and growth in Germany. And yet Scholz’s first budget suggests those hopes ...