Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron’s first annual checkup with the European Union’s budget doctor won’t be pretty. His government, which may gain from accelerating growth, is postponing the spending cuts needed to narrow the structural budget gap as required by the European Commission, say two people with knowledge of documents being sent to Brussels this month. With elements of the ...

Bloomberg The daughter of a Russian former double agent poisoned in southern England last month was discharged from hospital. Yulia Skripal, 33, was found collapsed on a bench in Salisbury alongside her father — Sergei Skripal — after being exposed to a nerve agent in an incident the British government blamed on Russia. Both patients have “responded exceptionally well” to ...

Bloomberg Malaysians will cast their vote on May 9 in what will be a showdown between caretaker Prime Minister Najib Razak and Mahathir Mohamad, the nation’s longest-serving premier. The campaign period will be shortened to 11 days, from 15 days in the 2013 election, with the nomination day for candidates set for April 28, Mohd Hashim Abdullah, chairman at the ...

Bloomberg Ireland’s deputy prime minister assailed UK Brexit Secretary David Davis’ suggestion that Sinn Fein is influencing the Dublin government as “nonsense,” in the latest sign of tension between the two countries over the UK vote to leave the EU. The Irish government under Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has “quite a strong influence from Sinn Fein” when it comes to ...

US President Donald Trump likes to equate the rally in stocks since the November 2016 elections with confidence in him and his policies. And yes, the S&P 500 Index has surged 22% since then, but a deeper look at equities, bonds and the dollar reveals anything but trust in his stewardship. Here’s the executive summary: US companies are valued less ...

With its plans to levy 25% tariffs on $50 billion of US products including soybeans, cars and aircraft, China looks to have stepped the simmering Trans-Pacific economic battle up a gear. The initial parries between Washington and Beijing resulted in little more than flesh wounds. There were a series of levies on steel and aluminum exports to the US, which ...

As Donald Trump works to kick Japan’s automakers out of their largest market, they may want to set their sights on an even bigger prize — China. Authorities in the US are considering making imported cars meet stricter environmental requirements, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration and industry officials it didn’t identify. This sort of a non-tariff barrier would ...

How the mood changes. Malaysia is now seen as the best growth story among emerging Southeast Asian markets. Year-to-date, foreign investors bought a net $635 million of the country’s shares, while pulling money out of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index has outperformed its peers with an 8 percent rally this year in dollar terms. ...

The Bank of England (BOE) has often had to fend off charges that years of easy money worsened inequality. It recently released a study concluding the opposite: that nine years of asset purchases that pumped 375 billion pounds ($527 billion) into a faltering world economy didn’t widen inequality after all: Whatever the marginal impact of the extraordinary period of accommodative ...

The past three decades of minimal real wage growth have led some people to wonder why they haven’t gotten ahead. And in much the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, con artists hate missing an opportunity to separate suckers from their money. This might explain why we see a special class of self-help gurus — none of whom were ...