International News

Bloomberg Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is formally instructing Canada’s finance minister to re-establish a firm budgetary target after the Covid-19 crisis and avoid creating any new permanent spending. In a so-called mandate letter to Chrystia Freeland, who is also deputy prime minister, Trudeau said she should spend as much as need to tackle short-term economic challenges but avoid any new ...

Bloomberg Britain is significantly less attractive as an international business location because of Brexit but remains well positioned compared with other major economies, according to a German study. The UK slipped behind the US to second place in the latest ranking published by Germany’s Foundation for Family Businesses, though it remains ahead of the rest of its Group of Seven ...

Bloomberg Italy’s government will ask parliament to approve another increase in the deficit later this month to pay for vaccines, healthcare, and support for companies and workers, according to Finance Minister Roberto Gualtieri. The request will be for 24 billion euros ($29 billion), Gualtieri said in an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper. That’s equivalent to 1.5% of Italy’s ...

Bloomberg German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said a slight economic recovery is on the horizon thanks to robust state aid preventing much of the potential fallout of the pandemic, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. He credited Germany’s fiscal stimulus and the Berlin government’s shift on crisis aid at the EU level with saving jobs, the German newswire quoted Scholz as telling a ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are removing Parler from their services, part of a growing backlash after the social media network was among those used to organise last week’s riots at the Capitol. Apple dropped Parler from its App Store, while Amazon’s cloud unit decided to stop hosting the social media company. They joined Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which removed ...

Bloomberg Twitter Inc. shares fall 6.1% in pre-market trading after the social media platform permanently banned outgoing President Donald Trump. The San Francisco-based company confirmed its decision in a blog post, saying Trump’s tweets breached policies by risking incitement to violence. It cited Trump’s posts referring to riots in the US capital last week. Mirabaud analyst Neil Campling said the ...

Bloomberg Despite the pandemic-induced recession of 2020, America’s young adults doubled their assets over the past four years, new data from the Federal Reserve show. This marks the first time the assets for so-called millennials have exceeded $10 trillion. But, this generation, the oldest of whom turn 40 this year, has a massive debt burden as well, according to the ...

Bloomberg The crash of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 is another blight on Indonesia’s already poor aviation safety record. The country has had several incidents linked to safety issues in the past, including poor maintenance, pilot training, communications or mechanical failures and air-traffic control problems. It’s the worst place in Asia to take an airplane, with 104 accidents and 2,353 related ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s government plans to create urgent legislation to formalise the use of virus contact-tracing data in investigations of serious crimes. Legislation will be introduced in the next sitting of parliament in February to limit the use of the data to probes of seven categories of serious crimes, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office said in a statement. Those ...

Bloomberg An online car hailing platform of DiDi Chuxing was fined 340,000 yuan ($53,000) for failing to implement the government’s requirements on coronavirus prevention, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport said at a briefing on Sunday. Didi’s drivers were fined a combined 1.07 million yuan for failing to sterilise cars, wear masks or failing to refuse passengers with no masks, ...