International News

Bloomberg Indonesia has a raft of stimulus options available to bolster Southeast Asia’s biggest economy if global conditions worsen, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The government is prepared to boost spending and “re-activate” measures used during the global financial crisis if domestic growth needs a boost, Indrawati said on Tuesday in an interview in Jakarta. The administration could both ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s budget deficit rose to the highest in almost three decades, ahead of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) first quarterly review of a bailout program that sought to curtail a fiscal blowout. The deficit increased to 8.9% of the nation’s gross domestic product in the year ended June compared with 6.6% a year earlier, according to provisional numbers released ...

Bloomberg Thailand is jump starting a decades-old plan to create a Southeast Asia electricity super-grid, and wants to be the power-trading hub at the center of it. The nation is set to triple the amount of electricity from Laos that it resells to Malaysia, while encouraging infrastructure upgrades stretching from Cambodia to Myanmar necessary for cross-border power trading, said Wattanapong ...

Bloomberg Singapore firms are likely to see more soured debt as the trade-reliant economy takes a hit from US-China tensions. That’s the view of debt restructuring experts, for whom more bad debt could mean increased business. Singapore’s government cut its forecast for economic growth this year to almost zero, and weak export data have stoked fears of a recession. The ...

Bloomberg India is considering relaxing local sourcing norms for foreign companies that sell only their own brand, a move that is likely to encourage Apple Inc. to set up stores, people with knowledge of matter said. According to the proposal, export of goods from a foreign company’s factory in India will be accounted as local sourcing, the people said, asking ...

Bloomberg For American retailers, what Trump giveth, Trump taketh away. President Donald Trump’s administration, which said just 10 days ago it would delay until December some of its new tariffs on Chinese goods, has hit the retail sector with a new blow: The new levies will be raised to 15% from 10% as retaliation after China threatened to impose additional ...

Bloomberg Denmark stuck to its growth forecasts for 2019 and 2020, as the new government seeks to navigate the export-oriented economy through a global slowdown and rising trade tensions. The Nordic country still expects gross domestic product to rise by 1.7 percent this year and 1.6 percent the next, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The Social Democratic government of ...

Bloomberg Demand for mortgages jumped last month to the highest since early 2017, according to data. Loans for house purchases rose almost 11% from a year earlier to a seasonally adjusted 43,342, lobby group UK Finance said. The report covers seven high street banks representing around 60% of total mortgage lending, data on which are due to be published by ...

Bloomberg A collapse in exports pushed Europe’s largest economy to the brink of recession in the second quarter. In a sign that an increasingly hostile trade war between the US and China is at least partially to blame for Germany’s deepening manufacturing malaise, shipments abroad declined 1.3%, the most in more than six years. That led to a contraction in ...

Bloomberg Tropical Storm Dorian is gaining strength as it approaches the Lesser Antilles and is forecast to skirt Puerto Rico as a weak hurricane. The storm was about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east-southeast of Barbados as of 8 pm New York time. With maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour, Dorian is expected to drop 3 to 8 inches ...