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UK’s Amazon craze puts retailers at breaking point

Bloomberg The UK is leading the way into an online-shopping future, and that has the country’s traditional brick-and-mortar retailers fighting for their lives. With 18 percent of retail sales taking place online in Britain, the stakes are even higher than in the US, where the comparable figure is 12 percent — and where department-store owner Bon-Ton Stores Inc has just ...

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Norway’s recovery on track; inflation surprisingly slows

Bloomberg Norway’s economic recovery continued in the fourth quarter led by rising consumer spending and investments while a report showed inflation unexpectedly slowed at the start of the year. Mainland economic growth, which excludes oil and shipping, expanded by 0.6 percent in fourth quarter, down from a revised 0.7 percent in the prior period, Statistics Norway said in a statement. ...

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Eurostar to add Amsterdam in biggest network expansion

Bloomberg Eurostar International Ltd. will link London with the Netherlands by rail starting April 4 in the biggest expansion of the Channel Tunnel express operator’s network since it commenced operations in 1994. Trains from the UK capital will take slightly over three hours to reach Rotterdam and a further 40 minutes before arriving in Amsterdam, Eurostar said. The company has ...

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Trinity Mirror buys rival UK tabloids for $177mn

Bloomberg Trinity Mirror Plc is buying rival Express and Star tabloids for 126.7 million pounds ($177 million), a milestone deal as Britain’s declining print media outlets seek scale to adapt to the shift of readers and advertisers online. “In a world of big global digital platforms, in a challenged industry, scale matters,” Simon Fox, chief executive officer of the publisher ...

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A stronger dollar is just what America needs

Until recently, President Donald Trump had wanted a weaker dollar because he romanticizes manufacturing. A weaker currency has been a temptation for world leaders since the early days of industrialization, as it’s generally believed it will provide a boost to exports and stimulate the economy in the short run. We all remember the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that led to competitive devaluations, ...

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Flipkart can bring in muscle to save money, live better

Flipkart’s bringing in the big guns. India’s leading e-commerce company looks set to team up with Walmart Inc., garnering the startup a valuation of as much as $20 billion in return for a stake that could be as large as 20%, Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai reported recently. There’s a lot that Flipkart Online Services Pvt could do with around $4 billion ...

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Sterling is soaring on imaginary smooth-Brexit

No doubt about it — The Bank of England is hawkish, and it is ready to embark on a rate-hiking cycle. Sterling took an instant leap higher to the dollar, and 10-year gilt yields rose to the highest levels seen since April 2016. Governor Mark Carney and the rest of the Monetary Policy Committee are leaving a lot to chance ...

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SpaceX once again achieves something unreasonable

‘It seems surreal to me,’ said Elon Musk, proprietor of SpaceX, and for once he was understating things. On Fenruary 6, his company blasted a 230-foot rocket into orbit, returned its two side boosters to Earth for a flawlessly synchronized landing, and — with exquisite nerd flair — propelled Musk’s own Tesla Roadster toward deep space, where it’s expected to ...

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The UK is down since Brexit, guess who’s up

When British voters decided in June 2016 to exit the European Union, investors who had anticipated the opposite result stampeded out of sterling and the currency plummeted a record 8.05 percent to a 31-year low. Almost 20 months later, the pound has mostly recovered, providing some satisfaction to commentators who’d predicted that Brexit would prove more distressing to the EU. ...

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The stock market is a lot like Bitcoin

Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market’s rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines—and blame them, too. Last year, Marko Kolanovic, global head of quantitative and derivative research at JPMorgan, estimated that ...

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