Bloomberg Typhoon Lan, which is forecast to strike near Tokyo, may cause an estimated $25 billion to $35 billion in damage, said Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler with Enki Research in Georgia. Lan is about 1,169 miles south of Tokyo with top winds of almost 150 miles per hour. That would make it the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane ...

Bloomberg Is Masayoshi Son the next Warren Buffett? A note from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. argues that Son’s SoftBank Group Corp. is the next Berkshire Hathaway Inc. “We like to think of SoftBank as a tech-focused Berkshire Hathaway,” analyst Chris Lane wrote, noting that investor returns have been similarly strong. In fact, Lane finds a lot that the Japanese ...

Bloomberg India moved to curb gold-trade irregularities by preventing some trading houses from importing the metal following a surge in shipments in recent months. The second-biggest consumer won’t issue or renew authorisation to firms nominated by the Reserve Bank of India that fall under the so-called four- and five-star categories, the trade ministry said in a notice on its website. ...

Bloomberg Air pollution levels in India’s capital soared off the charts once again as millions of Indians burst fire crackers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, despite a Supreme Court ban on the sale of fireworks in the region. Already one of the world’s most notoriously polluted mega cities, the capital saw its air quality index (AQI) gradually ...

­­­­­­­­­­­Bloomberg The future of the ride-hailing industry depends on the capricious largesse of two internet billionaires on opposite sides of the globe. Alphabet Inc., led by Larry Page, just backed Lyft Inc., while SoftBank Group Corp. chief Masayoshi Son is set to take a big stake in larger rival Uber Technologies Inc. Alphabet unit CapitalG led a $1 billion investment ...

Bloomberg Johnson & Johnson got a $417 million jury verdict thrown out after a California judge agreed the company didn’t have a duty to warn a woman who has since died that its Baby Powder could cause ovarian cancer. The ruling erased the fourth-largest US jury award of the year. It follows a Missouri appeals court’s ruling earlier in the ...

Bloomberg BMW AG said it was raided by European Union antitrust watchdogs as the EU ramped up a probe into the German car industry following reports that carmakers colluded on technology for decades. News of the search marks the latest development in a probe sparked earlier this year. Daimler AG reported a possible cartel as part of the EU’s leniency ...

Bloomberg Washington’s most powerful trade associations spent more than $30 million on lobbying in the third quarter as Congress ramped up efforts to overhaul of the US tax code. Real estate groups were among those spending heavily, according to lobbying disclosures released for three months. The National Association of Realtors, among Washington’s biggest spenders, doled out $11.1 million during the ...

Bloomberg Technology companies including Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. spent more than $10 million on federal lobbying in the third quarter, as Washington ratcheted up pressure on issues ranging from child trafficking to Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election. Amazon spent $3.41 million—its biggest quarter in at least nine years—on tax policy, cloud security and computing, and others, according ...

Bloomberg Economists are coming full circle on their view of the US economy’s performance last quarter. After cutting growth estimates in early September in anticipation of extensive damage from hurricanes Harvey and Irma, they’ve turned more optimistic as recent data have been fairly decent. Michael Gapen, chief US economist at Barclays Plc, raised his forecast to 2.5 percent, returning it ...