International News

Bloomberg The coronavirus outbreak is set to wipe out more than $10 billion from Indonesia’s tourism revenue this year as leisure travel comes to a near complete halt, the government said. The country is preparing stimulus packages for the industry and a safety net for workers to blunt the impact, President Joko Widodo said at a cabinet meeting. He predicted ...

Bloomberg Australia’s Airwallex Cayman Ltd raised $160 million from new investors including Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd and the venture-capital arm of Salesforce.com to accelerate its expansion in global payments. The fresh round from ANZ’s venture unit and Salesforce Ventures gives Airwallex a valuation of $1.8 billion, co-founder Lucy Liu said. Other participants included existing backers DST Global, ...

Bloomberg Just one kilogram of freshly caught squid a day was almost enough to live on for Thai fishermen like Wisut Boonnak. Now the catch has halved in price and he’s spending more time on village duties. “It’s the biggest price drop that I can remember,” said Wisut, who’s been fishing for the past 40 years off the southern Thai ...

Bloomberg The International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants policy makers to avoid repeating the Depression-era mistake of ratcheting back budget deficits. Instead, it’s urging them to ramp up fiscal stimulus when the coronavirus contagion starts to abate. “Once the recovery has happened and we are past the pandemic phase, for advanced economies it would be essential to undertake a broad-based stimulus,” ...

Bloomberg Finland’s lockdown will cause gross domestic product (GDP) to shrink between 1.5% and 2.0% for each month that it is in place, the Finance Ministry said Thursday. The longer the restriction measures last, the slower the recovery will be, Mikko Spolander, director general of the Economics Department, told reporters in Helsinki. “The danger is that the longer the economy ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration would like to make purchases of milk and meat products as part of a $15.5 billion initial aid package to farmers rattled by the coronavirus, said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. “We want to purchase as much of this milk, or other protein products, mutton and other products, and move them into where they can be utilised ...

Bloomberg Google parent Alphabet Inc. is slowing hiring for the remainder of the year, the most drastic action by the web search giant since the Covid-19 pandemic began battering its advertising business several weeks ago. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told staff about the decision in an email. He also highlighted other areas of cost cutting, saying the company will ...

Bloomberg Profits and dividends at Britain’s publicly traded companies are set to halve this year due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Citigroup Inc. predicts. The bank warned clients that the pandemic’s economic impact will be greater in the UK due to the country’s dependency on its services industry, which is deeply affected by social distancing efforts. While consensus is for a ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration is preparing to attack the legal basis of requirements to capture mercury and other heavy metal pollution from power plants, setting the stage for a court to potentially toss out the mandates altogether. The move will come in the form of a final Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule concluding those mercury pollution controls are too costly ...

Bloomberg India will allow makers of information technology hardware, farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after April 20 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi crafts a plan to exit the world’s biggest lockdown and revive stalled economic activity. Amid a three-week lockdown that’s been extended to May 3, the government will also lift restrictions to allow e-commerce companies, ...