International News

  Bloomberg Norway’s $1.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund reported its biggest loss since the 2008 financial crisis after markets were pummeled by faster inflation, higher credit costs and the fallout from the war in Ukraine. The fund that manages Norway’s fossil wealth lost 14.1% in 2022, equivalent to about $164 billion, according to a statement on Tuesday. It’s the world’s ...

  Bloomberg Brexit is costing the UK economy £100 billion a year ($124 billion), with the effects spanning everything from business investment to the ability of companies to hire workers. An analysis by Bloomberg Economics three years after Britain left the European Union paints a bleak picture of the damage done by the way the split has been implemented by ...

Bloomberg French labor unions are leading a second day of mass strikes and protests on Tuesday against raising the retirement age in a test of the momentum driving defiance to Emmanuel Macron’s signature economic reform. The country’s rail operator, SNCF, expects only one-third of high-speed TGVs to run and urged people to work from home. Subway and commuter trains serving ...

Bloomberg Chancellor Olaf Scholz is using a trip to Latin America to help Germany secure additional supplies of the lithium that car giants like Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Volkswagen AG need for their electric-vehicle batteries. Chile is the world’s second-largest supplier of lithium after Australia and much of its output is currently gobbled up by China. Scholz, who met with ...

  Bloomberg Denmark proposed to spend an extra 2.3 billion kroner ($340 million) on inflation aid, mainly targeting senior citizens. The government will now start talks with opposition parties in parliament to reach a broad deal and decide on the details, Finance Minister Nicolai Wammen told reporters in Copenhagen on Monday. Consumers in Denmark have been hit heavily by accelerating ...

  Bloomberg Germany’s economy shrank 0.2% at the end of last year — a worse outcome than previously flagged and one that makes a recession on the back of rising energy bills more likely after all. The figures Monday from the statistics office contrast with an estimate this month for output to have stagnated in the fourth quarter. They also ...

  Bloomberg Spanish inflation unexpectedly quickened in January after a five-month run of slowing price growth, prompting traders to boost their bets on how high the European Central Bank will raise interest rates. Consumer prices advanced by 5.8% from a year ago, up from the previous month’s 5.5% increase, the statistics institute in Madrid said Monday. That’s well above the ...

  Bloomberg Britain’s homebuilders have six weeks to sign a UK government contract that will commit them to repair unsafe cladding on apartment blocks — or face banishment from the housing market. The pledge will commit firms to spend an estimated £2 billion ($2.5 billion) to fix tall buildings they developed or refurbished over the past 30 years, according to ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he cannot raise UK taxes to fund pay rises for workers in the state-run National Health Service. “Where we are with taxes at the moment, we can’t put them up,” Sunak told an audience of health-care workers in northeastern England, adding that government spending on the NHS is at a historical high. “The pie ...

  Bloomberg For a few hours last week, British consumers were asked to make a choice: keep consuming power as normal or just turn the lights off. Hundreds of thousands of households took part in the effort to reduce electricity demand during a couple of hours when energy supplies were forecast to be particularly tight. There was a financial incentive ...