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Bloomberg There’s a powerful constant amid the to-and-fro of the US-China trade war as currency policy gets dragged into the standoff between the world’s two top economies: Beijing wants more gold in its reserves. China’s central bank expanded gold reserves again in July, pressing on with a run that stretches back to December. The People’s Bank of China raised holdings ...

Bloomberg Masayoshi Son can’t wait to wash his hands of Sprint Corp. SoftBank Group Corp. will stop consolidating the US carrier in its results starting next earnings report, anticipating a successful merger with T-Mobile USA Inc. despite questions over the deal’s eventual closing. That accounting change will slash SoftBank’s debt load and help it shed its image as a staid ...

Bloomberg A key measure of Japan’s economy fell to a level not seen since the wake of the financial crisis, adding to concerns about the economy ahead of an October sales-tax hike. The leading coincident index dropped to 93.3 in June, the lowest since February 2010, the Cabinet Office said. The index is one of Japan’s broadest indicators of current ...

Bloomberg Glencore Plc reported the weakest profit in three years and announced plans to halt about a fifth of the world’s cobalt production after prices for the battery metal plunged. Glencore will shutter Mutanda project in the Democratic Republic of Congo for about two years in a move to put a floor under cobalt market, which has seen prices fall ...

Bloomberg One of the UK’s largest pension funds, which oversees the retirement assets of 350,000 British railworkers, is betting on private credit to help preserve returns during the next downturn. RPMI Railpen aims to boost its exposure to private debt to as much as 40% within a private investment strategy totaling 4.5 billion pounds ($5.5 billion) across two funds. While ...

Bloomberg Zygmunt Solorz, a media-shy Polish billionaire who owns lignite-fired power plants and a TV network, just spoke out on an unexpected subject: ecology. Solorz, who made his $2.5 billion fortune on mobile phones and television, plans to set up an association called Clean Poland Program that will encourage Poles to care more about clean air. The European Union’s largest ...

Bloomberg The US National Highway Traffic Administration sent Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk a cease-and-desist letter last year regarding Model 3 safety claims and subpoenaed the carmaker for information on several crashes, according to documents posted by a nonprofit advocacy group. NHTSA lawyers took issue with an October 7 Tesla blog post that said the Model 3 had achieved the lowest ...

Bloomberg The escalating trade war between the US and China is nudging the world economy towards its first recession in a decade with investors demanding politicians and central bankers act fast to change course. In the US alone, the recession risk is “much higher than it needs to be and much higher than it was two months ago,” Lawrence Summers, ...

Bloomberg Add $4.4 billion in imported cabinets to the long list of Chinese goods slapped with US levies in the escalating trade dispute between Washington and Beijing. The Commerce Department said it will ask the US Customs and Border Protection to collect cash deposits from importers of the wooden cabinets and vanities from China based on subsidy rates of as ...

Bloomberg German industrial production registered its biggest annual decline in almost a decade, highlighting the severity of the trade-inflicted manufacturing slump in Europe’s largest economy. Output was down 5.2% in June from the previous year, the most since late 2009, when the country was recovering from the Great Recession that followed the global financial crisis. The numbers are the latest ...