China has begun a great rental giveaway, offering cheap land and subsidized loans in an effort to kick-start development of home leasing markets in major cities across the nation. Anyone expecting a rental housing boom to match the growth of the private purchase market may be disappointed, though: China’s real estate industry is likely to remain dominated by the development ...

‘California Regulates Cow Farts,’ is how a New York Post headline put it, implying it was a wacky move by Governor Jerry Brown. In fact, California’s methane law represents a serious attempt by America’s biggest dairy state to come to grips with a potent greenhouse gas. Methane is responsible for about a quarter of human-generated global warming. While it’s not ...

Even by government standards, it is a colossally dumb idea: revoking someone’s license to work as a way to get them to pay off their student loans. Yet many states do just that. Student loan debt has more than doubled since 2009 to $1.3 trillion today. The average borrower in the class of 2016 left campus more than $30,000 in ...

Bad things don’t happen to good banks. Or that’s the carefully crafted image projected by the world’s priciest lender. Assiduously shielding its loan book from the flying debris of India’s $207 billion bad-debt crisis, HDFC Bank Ltd. has kept its balance sheet in a near-pristine condition. The aura of invincibility bestowed by a 1.26 percent soured-loan ratio — compared with ...

Questions, questions, questions. If there’s one thing that’s tailed China’s Xiaomi Corp. for the past six years, it’s questions. The most recent come as a pair: Will the company IPO next year, and will it fetch the $50 billion it’s supposedly seeking? Last weekend, tech industry newsletter The Information reported that the maker of smartphones and other devices is eyeing ...

Not much time passes these days between so-called major advancements in artificial intelligence. Yet researchers are not much closer than they were decades ago to the big goal: actually replicating human intelligence. That’s the most surprising revelation by a team of eminent scholars who just released the first in what is meant to be a series of annual reports on ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG’s investment unit said it plans to pay out most of its earnings to shareholders as it seeks to attract investors to a planned initial public offering next year. The asset manager will use its DWS German retail brand to sell its products globally and will be renamed to reflect that brand, the bank said on Tuesday. ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s new assumption that global inflation will stay lower for longer means it is more exposed to the risk of prices picking up, Acting Governor Grant Spencer said. “More recently we have been assuming greater persistence in low global inflation and this is contributing to our current flat track for future OCR levels,” Spencer ...

Bloomberg Wall Street banks including Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America could share in a fee bonanza of as much as $600 million, after pledging one of the biggest financing checks ever to help fund CVS’s $67.5 billion takeover of Aetna. The companies are set to shell out fees for M&A advisory, financing and also arranging a bond sale ...

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. hired Deutsche Bank AG’s Sunil Khaitan to head its global capital markets business in India, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Khaitan was a Hong Kong-based director on Deutsche Bank’s Asia equity syndicate team, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. He is slated to start ...