Bloomberg Covid restrictions are stifling spending in China’s vast consumer market and turning some popular retailers and automakers into stock laggards. The outpouring of pent-up demand has been absent in Covid zero China. Instead, an uncertain growth outlook, coupled with record high youth jobless rate, has caused consumer discretionary stocks in the MSCI China Index to underperform the broader …

Bloomberg Oil mustered a late comeback after dropping to six-month lows this week as a softer dollar bolstered trader demand across assets. West Texas Intermediate settled above $86 a barrel, finishing a tumultuous week nearly flat with the prior seven days. At the start of the week both benchmarks, WTI and Brent, slipped to lows not seen since the start …

  Bloomberg Germany is increasingly getting vital chemicals from abroad as the country’s industrial giants like BASF SE struggle with sky-rocketing energy prices from Russian gas cuts. Chemical import volumes have almost doubled this year as the crisis deepened. Germany imported around 2.8 billion tonnes of inorganic chemicals in the first half of 2022, according to Germany’s federal statistics office. …