International News

New Delhi / Bloomberg India extended a tax on wheat imports by three months to protect farmers in the world’s second-largest grower from cheap overseas supplies. The 25 percent duty will stay until June 30, the Finance Ministry said in a notification dated March 28 on its website. India first imposed a 10 percent duty on imports in August and ...

Bloomberg The Bank of England recommended tighter lending criteria for buy-to-let mortgages and said it continues to look for signs that risks are accelerating. The Prudential Regulation Authority — the U.K.’s main banking supervisor and part of the central bank — published guidelines on Tuesday that aim to guard against a loosening of underwriting standards and bring all lenders into ...

London / Reuters Sterling climbed on Tuesday as European investors returned to work from the Easter break, up around 0.6 percent on a trade-weighted basis since the market close last Thursday, as nerves over a possible British exit from the EU quietened somewhat. The pound had hit a two-year low last week against the Bank of England’s trade-weighted basket of ...

Paris / AFP A decision by PSA Peugeot Citroen to double its chairman’s salary to five million euros has sparked angry debate in France, with Finance Minister Michel Sapin on Tuesday qualifying the raise as “harmful”. Carlos Tavares, the chairman of Europe’s second biggest carmaker, earned €5.24 million ($5.8 million) in 2015, up from 2.75 million in 2014, company documents ...

Bloomberg You know you have an issue with tax collection when the person tasked with boosting it is fired for fraud. But where some see a problem, others spot opportunity, and governments in eastern Europe have identified unpaid taxes as a means of swelling their coffers. Romania, whose tax chief was dispatched last month over alleged misallocation of European Union ...

Frankfurt / Reuters As the European Central Bank moves into an unfamiliar world of negative interest rates and incentives to encourage banks to make loans to businesses and consumers, a north-south divide is opening up between euro zone lenders. In the north, anaemic demand for loans and a financial system already flush with cash mean banks see mostly costs. They ...

SINGAPORE/ reuters The U.S. economy remains on track for a gradual path of interest rate hikes and fears over the impact of a slowing global economy and bouts of financial volatility are overdone, San Francisco Federal Reserve President John Williams said on Tuesday. “Others’ economic fates do not spell our own,” Williams said in a speech at the National University ...

Bloomberg Cemex SAB is staging its biggest rally in four years as the largest cement maker in the Americas gets a boost from cost cuts, U.S. sales gains and a rebound in the Mexican peso. Lower interest rates and taxes also will help the company boost free cash flow by $350 million this year, more than the previously targeted increase ...

Bloomberg Newspapers have settled on a strategy to stop withering away: feast on each other for survival. For the owners of big-city dailies like the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, buying smaller publications and slashing costs has become a way to buy time while figuring out how to make more money online. That was the logic behind the recent failed ...

Bloomberg Chile’s long-heralded economic recovery is on hold once again, at least for the rest of this year, the central bank said, cutting its growth and inflation forecasts for 2016. The world’s largest copper producer will expand 1.25 percent to 2.25 percent this year, policy makers said in their quarterly monetary policy report on Monday. The previous estimate was 2 ...