Was there ever really an Asian contender apart from Hong Kong to host Saudi Arabian Oil Co.’s IPO? Unlikely. The challenge for the world’s largest oil company, if it lists in the territory, will be keeping investors interested once trading starts. Saudi Arabia has shortlisted the city, along with London and New York, for the international portion of a potential ...

Wal-Mart has just announced higher wages and one-time bonuses for most of its workers — linking the news to the corporate tax cuts signed last month by President Donald Trump. It joins a growing list of companies saying “Thank you” to the president by raising their employees’ pay. The White House is crowing (its celebration only slightly dimmed by Wal-Mart’s ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week released its list of climate events that have had the greatest economic impact on the US from 1980 to 2017. At $306 billion, last year’s sustained costs due to weather disasters was 43 percent higher than in 2005, which had hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Hurricane Harvey alone caused $125 billion in ...

Behavioural economics has always met with a bit more resistance than it deserved. This is true even though a number of behavioural researchers have won the Nobel—Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler just last year. Despite this and other forms of official recognition at the highest levels, there continue to be some economists who have an almost instinctive aversion ...

Don’t be too derisive of Eastman Kodak Co.’s yearning to reclaim its lost glory by jumping on the crypto bandwagon. If the dotcom bubble holds any lessons, the blockchain gravy train might have plenty to go around yet. Investors aren’t waiting to see if the proposed KodakCoin is just a fad, or the real new, new thing for a company ...

For much of the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has been thinking aloud about Facebook Inc.’s mission. He kept saying he wanted Facebook to become a place for meaningful social interaction. His resolution for 2018 was to ‘fix’ Facebook. It was a call to arms, but for what? It wasn’t clear how his musings might translate into substantive changes to ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. isn’t giving up its mortgage-lending crown without a fight. The bank wants to hold on to its top spot as the whale of the $1.7 billion industry in the US, even as it predicts profit margins on making home loans will shrink this year and it faces pressure from rival Quicken Loans Inc. “We want ...

Bloomberg Canada’s financial watchdog plans to revise capital requirements for the nation’s banks, drafting more risk-sensitive interim rules while moving faster towards adopting new criteria set by global regulators. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions’ Carolyn Rogers announced the changes during a speech at a conference hosted by RBC Capital Markets in Toronto. She said Canadian banks would ...

Bloomberg Japan’s economy will exceed growth forecasts this year, prompting the central bank to tighten monetary policy by mid-year, said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics Inc. Sinai said he expects Japan’s economy to grow 2 percent in 2018, and even faster in 2019, perhaps as much as 2.5 percent. “What has snuck up on everybody is the world business ...

Bloomberg Morocco will adopt a more flexible exchange rate from Monday as part of a long-awaited plan aimed at boosting the competitiveness of the North African nation’s economy. Bank Al-Maghrib, Morocco’s central bank, said in a statement it would widen the official band within which the dirham fluctuates to 5 percent, with a maximum daily moves of 2.5 percent above ...