Amid resurgent nationalism and talk of nuclear war, it’s been a rough year for global diplomacy. So a 10-party agreement to protect the waters of the planet’s far north qualifies as a minor miracle. For the next 16 years, commercial fishing will be prohibited in the central Arctic, a Mediterranean-sized patch of icy ocean more than 200 nautical miles from ...

Punters who wanted to bet against Britain in the run-up to the Brexit vote thought they’d found the perfect target in Berkeley Group Holdings Plc, a London-focused homebuilder partly reliant on inflows of foreign capital to purchase it’s very expensive homes. Throw in a government decision to increase property transaction taxes and penalize purchases of buy-to-let homes, and you had ...

Tax debates make for strange bedfellows. During the long, slow recovery from the Great Recession, Americans became accustomed to a familiar economic debate — Keynesians, usually aligned with the Democratic Party, would call for more government spending in order to stimulate the economy, while Republicans would call for cuts in outlays. Eventually, a compromise was reached, though dangerous theatrics were ...

Patrick Drahi, the telecoms billionaire whose debt-fuelled expansion spree is running out of steam, is finding it hard to break free of a downward markets spiral. A full-blown bear attack is still ongoing after last month’s profit warning from Altice SA, the Drahi holding company. Hedge funds have piled up negative bets on a stock that’s fallen 56 percent since ...

With the ongoing synchronized pick-up in global growth, systemically important central banks will likely be more willing and able in 2018 to start and, in one case continue, the normalisation of monetary policy. But what is true for the central banking community as a whole is more nuanced when assessed at the level of individual institutions. Here is the outlook ...

Bloomberg With an initial Brexit deal out of the way, pound traders will be focussing on whether optimism over that lasts and shifts the Bank of England’s thinking this week. Even with an agreement to move Brexit talks on to trade and no expectations for the BOE to change interest rates, news on either front could drive the currency, according ...

Reuters Major Gulf stock markets rose on Sunday in line with strength in global bourses at the end of last week, with Saudi Arabia and Egypt leading. The Saudi index rose 0.8 percent points to 7,145, bouncing for a second straight day from technical support around 7,000 points in very heavy trade. Real estate firm Dar Al Arkan, the most ...

Bloomberg China’s banks should increase their capital buffers to pro- tect against any sudden economic downturn following a credit boom, the International Monetary Fund said. In its first comprehensive assessment of China’s financial system since 2011, the IMF recommended “a gradual and targeted increase in bank capital.” In a worst-case scenario, IMF stress tests suggested the country’s lenders would face ...

Bloomberg ICICI Securities Ltd., a unit of India’s largest private-sector lender by assets, has picked arrangers for an initial public offering that could value the company at more than 200 billion rupees ($3.1 billion), people familiar with the matter said. The brokerage arm of ICICI Bank Ltd. selected Bank of America Corp (BofA) and Citigroup Inc. to advise on the ...

Bloomberg The financial industries of Sweden and Denmark were quick to criticise the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s completed framework, arguing it will hit Scandinavian lenders too hard. “The Basel standards will, if they are fully implemented in the EU and Sweden, have large negative effects for Swedish banks, their clients and the Swedish economy,” Hans Lindberg, the head of ...