Bloomberg Vermilion Energy Inc. agreed to buy Spartan Energy Corp. for about C$1.08 billion ($860 million) in stock, adding to its production and acreage in southeast Saskatchewan in the largest oil and gas company takeover in Canada this year. Spartan holders will get 0.1476 of a Vermilion share for each Spartan share, Vermilion said in statement. That represents a premium ...

In recent years, a number of economic ideas once considered unassailable have been called into question. The financial crisis and Great Recession throw much of macroeconomic and financial wisdom out the window, and now new evidence is challenging orthodoxy in a variety of areas. For example, recent studies suggests that labour markets don’t work the way economists traditionally believed, and ...

Tech or media? What to many people is an esoteric question could end up making a multibillion-dollar difference to Chinese companies that serve up content ranging from jokes to gossip. Technology firms, those ground-breaking companies with research teams hard at work building moats, are more highly prized than media counterparts that merely provide content. In the S&P 500, for example, ...

Will you cross a bridge if you don’t know what’s on the other side? Unlikely. That’s the dilemma investors face as they look forward to the London-Shanghai Connect stock trading link that’s scheduled to start by year-end. The program’s timing was announced this week by People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang, who also said authorities will quadruple daily trading ...

Having spent nearly a decade crafting new capital requirements to bolster the resilience of the country’s largest banks, the US Federal Reserve is getting ready to do some fine-tuning. The rules can certainly be improved — but what’s needed is more than tinkering around the edges. The Fed has two main tools to ensure banks have enough equity capital, the ...

I once congratulated Mario Draghi on his performance as president of the European Central Bank (ECB), telling him he had made only one mistake. “What’s that?” came the instant question. “Taking the job,” I replied. My point was that by the time Draghi was appointed, the ECB could no longer hope to be a conventional central bank, if indeed it ...

The field of weather forecasting holds a lesson that economists might do well to heed: Stop being so sure of yourself. The reputation of the economics profession suffered after the 2008 financial crisis, in large part because its practitioners were so overconfident. They have since been working to forge more realistic models of the economy, and re-examining some of their ...

Imagine if the US banned Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg’s disappointing performance last week on Capitol Hill. Something similar happened in Russia on Monday as the country’s internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, ordered internet providers to block access to the Telegram messenger. This being Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the ban isn’t just an attack on the freedom of communication and expression: It happens ...

Bloomberg China will impose temporary anti-dumping deposits on US sorghum imports from Wednesday, adding to trade tensions between the world’s biggest economies. Soybean meal futures climbed on concerns the oilseed could be targeted next. Imports will incur a 178.6 percent duty, China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a preliminary ruling. That’s in compliance with domestic law and World Trade Organization ...

Bloomberg Vingroup JSC, Vietnam’s biggest developer, is targeting an initial equity offering of as much as $2 billion for its luxury residential arm, people with knowledge of the matter said. The Hanoi-based group’s Vinhomes JSC unit is considering seeking a valuation of $13 billion to $16 billion in the share sale, according to one of the people, who asked not ...