In February 2015, economists at HSBC Holdings in London coined the terms “hard” and “soft” Brexit. The latter would maintain “much of the status quo” if the UK voted to quit the European Union; the former entailed “huge risk and would be operationally complicated.” Even just after the Brexit vote, you could be forgiven for seeing the hard option ...

  How do you celebrate the fifth anniversary of a colossal mistake? For India’s tax department, the answer has to be: Make a new one that’s a thousand times worse, then sit back and enjoy the fun. There can be no other explanation for the “clarifications” the authorities issued before Christmas, instructing fund managers to withhold and pay taxes when ...

  Even by his standards, President-elect Donald Trump’s statements on trade have been stunning in their recklessness. His proposals essentially amount to the repudiation of a system that has fostered global stability and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last several decades — and if he actually intends to execute his radical agenda, there’s little ...

  This is one of the mysteries that has already put the ability of technology to test and will continue to frustrate the world in future. The search of missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has been abandoned after almost three years. The plane vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Crews completed their deep-sea ...

  Bloomberg Morgan Stanley reported an 83 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit as fixed-income trading revenue more than doubled, surpassing analysts’ estimates. Net income climbed to $1.67 billion, or 81 cents a share, from $908 million, or 39 cents, a year earlier, the New York-based company said on Tuesday in a statement. The 2015 figure includes a 4-cent accounting charge ...

  Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. is emerging as a winner in the fight for corporate clients and investment-banking fees in Brazil as some of its competitors retreat. The US firm turned in its best showing ever last year in the South American nation, raking in more fees from merger-and-acquisition advising and debt and equity underwriting than any company except ...

  Bloomberg China is increasingly managing the flow of credit with more finely-tuned instruments than its old method of changing how much of their deposits lenders must keep locked away. Banks’ required reserve requirements haven’t changed for almost a year. Instead, the central bank has used short-term lending channels to add almost six times as much funding than would have ...

  Bloomberg Australian banks have ‘appreciably improved’ their mortgage-lending standards, the nation’s regulator said, as it left the amount of additional capital banks are required to hold as a buffer against the build-up of credit risk at zero. The pace of lending to property investors is currently at around half of the regulator’s recommended levels, and higher-risk mortgages had fallen, ...

  Bloomberg Finance executives say they are preparing for the worst on Brexit as Prime Minister Theresa May signaled she plans to pull the UK out of the European single market. “If you don’t know where you are going, you have to plan for the worst and execute faster,” HSBC Holdings Plc Chairman Douglas Flint said in a speech at ...

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), an independent, research-driven graduate-level university focused on advanced energy, and sustainable technologies, and the Korea University on Tuesday signed a research collaboration agreement to develop energy-efficient desalination technologies. The research project aims to confirm the viability of large-scale production of desalinated water from a plant fully ...