Bloomberg Saudi Arabia’s King Salman held his first-ever cabinet meeting in Neom, a planned $500 billion futuristic city that will host more robots than people in a desolate peninsula in the kingdom’s northwest. The sci-fi city on the Red Sea coast is designed to represent Saudi Arabia’s efforts to transform itself away from oil. The 82-year-old monarch’s visit there for …

Bloomberg A California-based clean-energy financing company closed a $103 million bond offering backed by commercial loans supporting renewables, energy-efficiency and water and seismic-upgrade projects. CleanFund Commercial PACE Capital Inc.’s bond deal is one of the first to bundle C-PACE obligations — commercial property assessed clean-energy — according to a statement. PACE uses property tax liens to repay the debts. The …

Bloomberg China’s central bank has started actively encouraging banks to extend more credit by taking a softer stance on loan quotas, people familiar with the matter said, as authorities ratchet up efforts to bolster a cooling economy. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has delivered the message via so-called window guidance, said the people, who asked not to be named …