Bloomberg Italian consumer confidence unexpectedly fell this month as shoppers start to plan their Christmas gift expenditures. The household sentiment dropped to 114.3 from a revised 116.0 in October, statistics agency Istat said Monday in Rome. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 12 analysts called for a November reading of 116.5. “It’s bad news ahead of Christmas,” said ...

Bloomberg Cable companies are settling on a new strategy to combat streaming services like Netflix and Hulu: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc., the two biggest US cable operators, are in talks to offer Hulu’s on-demand service through their set-top boxes, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Comcast, the largest cable ...

Bloomberg Germany’s political stalemate showed signs of easing as the Social Democrats started haggling over terms of a renewed coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc rather than outright blocking an alliance between Germany’s two biggest parties. The possibility of the SPD again joining a Merkel-led government in a “Grand Coalition” has unfolded quickly, with the party opening the door ...

Bloomberg Russia’s deputy foreign minister said North Korea’s current pause in provocations — the longest since last winter — indicates a step toward denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. “I think North Korea’s restraint for the past two months is within the simultaneous freeze road map” suggested by China and Russia, Igor Morgulov told reporters in Seoul on Monday. Russian and ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May has a week to find a compromise on the conflicting Brexit demands from the north and south of Ireland, and a political scandal threatening the Irish government could further undermine her chances of success. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar wants written assurances that Brexit won’t mean a return to checkpoints and towers along what will ...

Bloomberg The Catalan independence movement is divided over how to move forward as opinion polls suggest the December regional election is too close to call. While ousted President Carles Puigdemont doubled down this weekend on his pledge to make the wealthy region an independent state, his former ally Esquerra Republicana suggested the party should focus on policy instead. The clash ...

Bloomberg Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who won a new five-year term last year, said it’s time for him to step aside and let the Kremlin choose a successor. A Russian official downplayed the statement as an emotional message meant to show he’s not clinging to power, the Interfax news service reported. “There was a time when people like me were ...

By the middle of the century, nuclear-powered Chinese shuttles will regularly ply interplanetary space, carrying workers between mining colonies on distant planets and asteroids. If that, like much else published on the front page of the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, sounds like propaganda, remember that China has in barely two decades built up what’s arguably ...

It took just 24 hours for politics and optics to trump economics and common sense. Recently, I suggested that India was striking the right balance by preventing only “wilful” defaulters from bidding for their own assets in bankruptcies. Since with most of the country’s $207 billion of impaired loans, there’s no proof of malfeasance by the controlling shareholders—or promoters as ...

Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing the right alternative commodity-linked currency to pay for their groceries. First we got the Bitcoin Visa card, the perfect gift for those who want an easy way spend a cryptocurrency that has gained 800 percent this year on goods whose price is up a relatively mild 3 percent. Swipe the ...