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  Bloomberg Germany’s economy is running at full speed, yet some of its biggest companies are far from getting carried away about the future. Thyssenkrupp AG last week became the latest of the country’s top firms to intertwine words of caution in what’s shaping up to be a strong earnings season, joining peers like Siemens AG in warning against global ...

  Bloomberg Buying your sweetheart a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates could be cheaper this year thanks to booming cocoa supplies. Growers are collecting bigger harvests in Latin America and in West Africa, which accounts for about 70 percent of global production. The output gains have pushed cocoa futures to the lowest since 2008, cutting costs for companies including Mondelez ...

  Bloomberg The average price of a UK home hit a new record in January, continuing an upward trend that’s in part being driven by a supply-demand imbalance. The 0.3 percent increase in values lifted the average to 300,169 pounds ($374,000), Acadata and LSL said in a report on Monday. Annual growth was 3.1 percent, and prices are now double ...

  Bloomberg Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller sought to calm nerves at the German carmaker as festering disputes with labor leaders and allegations from former Chairman Ferdinand Piech threatened to disrupt efforts to overcome its diesel-cheating scandal. “You’re all certainly as irritated as I am, because Volkswagen needs something totally different now: namely, concentration in order to cleanly ...

  Bloomberg Property owners are likely to start cashing in to a greater extent this year after an eight-year rally in prices across the Nordic real estate markets, according to Pangea Property Partners. Potential sellers include funds, companies that want to streamline their portfolios and private investors who see good exit opportunities, Pangea said in its Real Estate Outlook 2017 ...

  Bloomberg There are limits to investors’ love affair with OPEC. After unprecedented optimism that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will manage to ease a global supply glut, money managers reduced their bets on rising West Texas Intermediate prices for the first time in a month. While the group and other major exporters are pumping less crude, US inventories ...

  Bloomberg Egyptian Finance Minister Amr El-Garhy said he expects surging inflation to peak by the end of the first quarter as the price shocks following an increase in fuel prices and the pound’s flotation fade. El-Garhy said policy makers expected prices to jump after currency controls were abandoned in November to help Egypt clinch a $12 billion International Monetary ...

  Reuters Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, plans to cut crude exports from its southern port of Basra to 3.013 million barrels per day (bpd) in March, a loading programme obtained by Reuters on Monday showed. The March volume is 628,000 bpd less than what was planned for February and the lowest since the August programme, adding to signs that Baghdad ...

  Bloomberg The election of Donald Trump in the US and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union are heightening economic risk in the euro area, the European Commission said, as it predicted growth would slow this year. In its first set of economic forecasts compiled since Trump’s victory and with the British government gearing up to officially trigger ...

  Bloomberg Toyota Motor Corp. recently ceded its title as the world’s best-selling automaker to arch-rival Volkswagen AG. Yet the Japanese company’s biggest adversary this year may be US President Donald Trump. Japan’s largest automaker expects profit to fall to 1.7 trillion yen ($15.1 billion) for the fiscal year ending next month, about a quarter less than the previous annual ...