International News

Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a Europe-wide economic stimulus program to be financed by the European Union’s budget, making a national appeal that helping its partners would be good for Germany. “A European growth program could support an upswing over the next two years and we’ll work for that,” Merkel said in a speech to the lower house ...

Bloomberg Italy’s government expects its budget deficit to spiral to 10.4% of gross domestic product (GDP) this year as the economy paralysed by a nationwide lockdown is seen shrinking by 8%. The government is set to request parliamentary approval for broadening the budget deficit by 55 billion euros ($59.4 billion) to fund a new stimulus package, according to officials, who ...

Bloomberg The coronavirus pandemic is putting untold pressure on the supply chains that produce and transport the world’s food. Yet there’s one vital factor even harder to control than panic buying — the weather. A period of extreme weather that devastates harvests could force countries to deploy more protectionist food policies, creating a ripple effect through global trade. Concerns over ...

Bloomberg Zoom Video Communications Inc., the San Jose, California-based company, has been lambasted for its security flaws, but the backlash hasn’t slowed growth. The company reported a 50% surge in use of the online meeting application in the past three weeks. On April 21, more than 300 million people used Zoom’s flagship videoconferencing app, up from about 200 million on ...

Bloomberg Singapore will witness a deeper recession this year after the nation extended and tightened its partial lockdown, Citigroup Inc warned, widening its forecast for an economic contraction. The city-state’s economy will contract by 8.5% in 2020, down from an earlier estimate of a 6% fall, economists Wei Zheng Kit and Kai Wei Ang wrote after Singapore extended “circuit breaker” ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc will invest $5.7 billion in the digital assets controlled by India’s richest man, the US social-networking giant’s biggest deal since the 2014 purchase of WhatsApp as it seeks a broader foothold in its biggest global market. The US company will buy about 10% of Jio Platforms, becoming the largest minority shareholder, Reliance Industries Ltd said in a ...

Bloomberg South China Morning Post, a newspaper owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, is cutting executives’ salaries and asking some workers to take unpaid leave as the coronavirus crisis has hurt revenue. CEO Gary Liu and Editor-in-Chief Tammy Tam are among 27 senior executives who have agreed to pay reductions immediately, the company said on its newspaper ...

Bloomberg Indonesia banned an annual ritual of citizens travelling in large numbers to their hometowns and villages ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. President Joko Widodo, who announced the ban at a cabinet meeting in Jakarta, said the prohibition was based on an assessment that about ...

Bloomberg European Union (EU) leaders head to a key virtual summit on Thursday without any concrete proposals from the bloc’s institutions on how to finance a controversial economic recovery fund, raising the chances of yet another inconclusive showdown. A “roadmap” distributed to national delegations from EU Council President Charles Michel, who will chair the video conference, contains no details on ...

Bloomberg The US Treasury has deployed more than half of the Coronavirus Relief Fund, which provides for payments to state, local, and tribal governments. The daily Treasury statement notes that, $81.9 billion had been used this month. The $150 billion fund was established to help lessen the economic impact of the Covid-19 outbreak. The coronavirus pandemic has crushed sources of ...