Bloomberg Three years ago, Amazon.com Inc. launched a marketplace to connect its customers with handymen, landscapers and housekeepers in their neighbourhoods, a direct challenge to the likes of Angie’s List Inc. and Yelp Inc. The offering embraced the independent contractor model, using Amazon’s web store to create a new service from scratch without hiring a single person or buying any …

BEIRUT / Reuters Lebanon’s government plans to swap $5 billion of new foreign currency bonds for Lebanese pound debt with the central bank, in an operation its finance minister suggested would slash the cost of servicing its huge debt pile by as much as $1.5 billion. Ali Hassan Khalil, speaking in parliament, said 218 billion pounds ($145 million) of the …

Bloomberg Japanese banks must move forward with consolidation by using everything from mergers to informal tie-ups to tackle declining profitability, according to the new chief of the industry’s main lobby group. “Consolidation has to advance from here, and the formats for doing this are going to get more diverse,” Koji Fujiwara, who starts as chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association …