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Bloomberg Bob Ravnaas raised a paddle in a Houston auction house to secure his first block of mineral rights 19 years ago, when oil prices were swooning below $20 a barrel. A generation later, that same West Texas oilfield is still spinning off royalties, part of a mineral-rights empire amassed by Ravnaas that stretches across 20 states and delivers millions ...

Bloomberg Add costlier debt and thinner profit margins to the list of woes for Canada’s oil patch. The Bank of Canada’s decision to increase its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point to 0.75 percent will raise borrowing costs for oil producers already grappling with prices stuck near $45 a barrel. The rate hike also sent the Canadian dollar to ...

Bloomberg Xie Shuijuan, a lifelong textile seller in Shaoxing, eastern China, says a clampdown by zealous officials on pollution caused by the local dyeing industry has boosted prices, squeezed her margins, and bankrupted some of her friends. Yet she’s not opposed. “This river used to smell in the summer and garbage floated on the surface,” Xie said, sitting in her ...

Bloomberg China’s drive to dominate the electric-vehicle market has claimed another overseas target. When Japanese electric-vehicle startup GLM Co. needed more funding to put its high-end sports car into production, domestic backers couldn’t muster the financing. The search for an investor ended this week, when a Hong Kong-based investment company called O Luxe Holdings agreed to purchase the firm for ...

Bloomberg Toshiba Corp., whose sale of its chip unit is being challenged in court by manufacturing partner Western Digital Corp., agreed to hold off closing the deal until a hearing on July 28. Toshiba will proceed with negotiations and contract signing in the meantime, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement. The two companies were in court in the US ...

Bloomberg Chinese officials and executives have been roaming the farmland of Iowa and doing what might appeal to US President Donald Trump most: deals. Contracts signed— for the import of 12.5 million tons of US soybeans and tons of beef — can be seen as another result of the renewed economic-diplomacy push started by Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ...

Bloomberg Argentina’s IPO market hasn’t had quite the jolt some investors were expecting. A year and a half after President Mauricio Macri took office, new share sales are slow to take off. Just one company has completed an international initial public offering. The delay comes as private companies wait for their valuations to rise, while taking advantage of their low ...

Bloomberg In 2014, UK builder Carillion Plc was riding high: it had just won a $434 million contract to build the Royal Liverpool Hospital and was attempting to snap up its struggling rival Balfour Beatty Plc for about $2.6 billion. Three years later, and the former Tarmac business is on life support. Carillion has lost 70 percent of its market ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration took its case directly to US governors that the pending Senate health-care bill won’t hurt their residents with insurance, even as critics say it will cut billions in funding and leave millions more people without coverage. “You listen to one side, and they said, ‘Your funding’s not going to be decreased,”‘ said Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, ...

Bloomberg AT&T Inc. is planning major organizational changes to follow the $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc., including a redefined role for Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson, as the telecommunications giant morphs into a media company. Stephenson will oversee a pair of CEOs who will independently manage the company’s telecommunications and media businesses, according to people familiar with the ...