International News

Bloomberg European credit markets have just completed a round-trip recovery from peak pandemic fear. Borrowing costs are retreading pre-crisis levels, with confidence in an economic recovery sparking double-digit gains in the riskiest debt. Healthier balance sheets are turning 2021 into the year of the rising star as more companies re-establish investment-grade credentials — the reversal of 2020’s swell of fallen-angel ...

Bloomberg Chinese social media titan ByteDance Ltd plans to hire an additional 13,000 employees this year for its education unit as the company aims to grab a bigger slice of the country’s booming online learning market. ByteDance, the owner of the short video app TikTok, said that it will hire 10,000 educational professionals, including tutors and course designers, in China ...

Bloomberg Rishi Sunak can do self-restraint. After an addiction to drinking full-strength Coca-Cola resulted in seven fillings to his teeth, he rationed himself to a single Coke a week. When he comes to deliver his budget on Wednesday, the chancellor of the exchequer faces a battle to persuade his colleagues of the need to turn down the flow of government ...

Bloomberg The US has dropped a key demand in negotiations over digital taxation of technology companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., lifting a barrier that had raised transatlantic trade tensions and prevented an international deal. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told her counterparts at a virtual meeting of Group of 20 finance officials that the US is no ...

Bloomberg Argentina is considering using new reserves to be issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to make a payment due to the lender in September, a move that would allow more time to overhaul an outstanding $45 billion loan. The new IMF reserve assets, called special drawing rights, or SDRs, would give cash-strapped Argentina fresh funding to pay the ...

Bloomberg Switzerland’s economy unexpectedly expanded at the end of last year, with foreign demand for its goods helping offset the impact of lockdown measures to control the pandemic. Gross domestic product (GDP) increased 0.3% in the fourth quarter, compared with estimates for a stagnation in a Bloomberg survey of economists. “On the whole, the second wave of the coronavirus until ...

Bloomberg The European Union’s (EU) fiscal rules should be adapted to allow for more spending to boost growth as countries struggle to pull their economies out of pandemic-induced recessions, according to the bloc’s top economic official. EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, speaking at the European Fiscal Board’s annual conference, reiterated calls to withdraw public support very gradually in order ...

Bloomberg Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is weighing as much as 50 billion euros ($61 billion) in additional debt spending to fight fallout from coronavirus crisis. Germany’s coronavirus cabinet discussed the financing for Covid-19 tests and other measures to support Europe’s largest economy. The funding — equivalent to about 1.5% of German gross domestic product — reflects an initial estimate, and ...

Bloomberg UK unemployment climbed to its highest rate in almost five years in the fourth quarter as the economic toll from the coronavirus pandemic continued to mount. The number of people looking for work rise 121,000 from the third quarter, taking the jobless rate to 5.1%, the most since early 2016, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday. The ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. backed down from its news blackout in Australia after government agreed to amend world-first legislation forcing the tech giant and Google to pay local publishers for content. The social-media platform switched off news sharing in Australia last week in opposition to the proposed law, and Mark Zuckerberg and government officials have been locked in talks to find ...