International News

Bloomberg Nokia Oyj plans to redesign its offices globally, adapting workplaces in 130 countries to a more flexible post-pandemic work environment. The Finnish company is seeking to capture the benefits of having had virtually all staff work remotely for the past 15 months. Starting next year, roughly 70% of office space will be dedicated to collaboration and team work and ...

Bloomberg Google’s parent firm plans to close its seven-story hub devoted to helping startups in London’s Shoreditch district and replace it with virtual services following the shift to home-working. The move comes after the pandemic showed Alphabet Inc that it could serve young firms across the country without the need for a physical space, according to a statement. Google was ...

Bloomberg Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi made a bold call for more economic stimulus in European countries to help bring growth back to pre-pandemic levels. “Protracted uncertainty means that the case for monetary and fiscal expansion remains compelling,” the former European Central Bank (ECB) chief said in speech in Barcelona. “We will not reach this objective without additional effort. So ...

Bloomberg The International Monetary Fund (IMF) privately estimates that a deal allowing Argentina to reschedule payments on $45 billion owed to the lender will be pushed into 2022 as President Alberto Fernandez has little incentive to quickly agree on the basis of a new program. While the IMF has said it’s constructively engaging with Fernandez’s administration, negotiations entailing fiscal austerity ...

Bloomberg The outlook for the UK’s sovereign debt score has been upgraded to stable by Fitch Ratings, which said that the country’s economy and public finances have proved more resilient to the pandemic shock than the credit assessor had anticipated. Fitch previously had a negative outlook on the UK, but the country avoided being downgraded, with the firm keeping its ...

Bloomberg Polish wages are growing at the fastest pace since 2008, raising concern over a spike in inflation that the central bank said is temporary. Average wages in industrial sector jumped 10.1% in May compared with a year earlier, the Statistical Office said. When Poland last had double-digit wage growth, the central bank’s benchmark interest rate stood at 6%, compared ...

Bloomberg US retail sales declined in May, after a stimulus-related splurge in the prior two months, suggesting consumers are starting to shift more of their spending to services as economy reopens. The total value of retail purchases fall 1.3% in May following an upwardly revised 0.9% gain in April, Commerce Department figures showed. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey ...

Bloomberg The White House reiterated President Joe Biden’s opposition to indexing the gasoline tax to inflation to help pay for an infrastructure plan, raising new questions about the viability of a bipartisan compromise emerging in the Senate. “After the extraordinarily hard times that ordinary Americans endured in 2020 — job losses, shrinking incomes, squeezed budgets — he is simply not ...

Bloomberg Germany is lobbying the European Commission to set stricter climate protection targets for the region’s car and aviation industries, according to Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In a position paper sent to the European Union (EU) executive, the government urged “ambitious fleet limits” for emissions from new cars in Europe by 2030, the newspaper reported. CO2 limits for automakers are a “decisive ...

Bloomberg Canadians are piling on debt to purchase property at the fastest pace in more than a decade amid a pandemic-driven housing boom. Household mortgage debt grew by 1% in April to C$1.69 trillion ($1.4 trillion), Statistics Canada reported. That’s the fastest pace since 2010. In absolute terms, residential mortgage credit was up C$17 billion during the month, the largest ...