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Bloomberg India, the world’s biggest consumer of gold after China, increased the import tax on the precious metal for the first time since 2013, spurring domestic prices to a record. Shares of jewellers slumped. The import tax on gold and other precious metals will be raised to 12.5 percent from 10 percent, Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said while presenting the ...

Bloomberg Thailand’s struggling tourism industry is finding support with visitors from the population colossus to its west, just as the years of bumper arrivals from the giant to its north are beginning to wane. At a beachfront hotel on the tropical island of Phuket, the occupancy rate from Chinese clientele has stalled, while bookings from India have begun to rise. ...

Bloomberg Trade tensions and uncertainty surrounding Brexit are raising economic risks for the euro area, prompting France to urge Germany to loosen its purse strings to support growth. “It would be irresponsible not to examine the need for new investments in the euro zone,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said at an annual economic conference in Aix-en-Provence, in southern ...

Bloomberg Orange SA Chief Executive Officer Stephane Richard will have to resign if he’s convicted next week on decade-old allegations of fraud, a top finance ministry official said. A Paris court will decide on July 9 whether Richard helped businessman Bernard Tapie cheat the government out of about 403 million euros ($455 million) in 2008, when he was chief of ...

Bloomberg The blistering heatwave that struck Germany and other parts of Europe last month shows the country needs to take further action to protect the environment, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly podcast. “Extreme weather events are becoming more common,” Merkel said. “Together we must react to the situation.” The increased use of renewable energy, along with efforts to ...

Bloomberg Starbucks Corp issued an apology to Tempe, Arizona Police Chief Sylvia Moir and her department after six officers were asked to leave a store in the city following a request by a customer on July 4. The barista approached the officers as a customer didn’t feel safe in their presence, the Tempe Officers Association said in a series of ...

Bloomberg Apple’s Steve Jobs was singular in his ability to take a company “on a path to die” and turn it into the world’s most valuable — in part by “casting spells,” billionaire Bill Gates said. Gates spoke of Jobs, the Apple Inc co-founder and chief executive officer who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, in a segment on leadership ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration said trade talks with China are starting up again as Beijing reiterated that it’s essential the US removes all existing tariffs for a deal to be reached. US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed last month to re-start trade talks and suspend new tariffs, but they gave no time-frame for further negotiations or ...

Bloomberg Oil posted its first weekly loss since mid-June, as a forecast-topping US employment report wasn’t enough to offset the economic worries dogging the market. Futures in New York closed down 1.6 percent for the week, despite eking out an increase after the government said payrolls climbed by 224,000 in June. The ultimate fallout from the report was unclear as ...

Bloomberg India plans to raise as much as $10 billion from its first overseas sovereign bond because there’s huge appetite for its debt in the foreign market, according to a top finance ministry official. “It’s a cautious beginning, which we need to make,” Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Garg said in an interview. “In terms of risk management I don’t see ...