To President Donald Trump, and any other Group of 20 chief thinking about waging a currency war: It’s basically impossible to win. That’s partly because they don’t really happen in practice. If they did, everybody would lose because everyone would play. The surest way to affect the relative value of an exchange rate is through nudging interest rates up or ...

The vast majority of Americans have air conditioning but in Germany almost nobody does. At least not yet. So when temperatures in Berlin rose to an uncomfortable 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) this week – a record for the month of June – I was uncommonly delighted to go to the Bloomberg office, where it’s artificially and blissfully cool. By letting ...

In a poor, underbanked country, there wouldn’t be anything unusual about imposing a $6.40–a-month penalty on depositors unable to keep at least $640 in their savings accounts. That’s just how financial exclusion works. But in rich Hong Kong, a city that gives banks more than $26 billion in annual earnings, it took a fintech revolution to make HSBC Holdings Plc ...