Bloomberg US consumer confidence unexpectedly dropped for the fourth time in five months in December, as expectations for income and job-market conditions coutinued to edge down. The Conference Board’s gauge decreased to 126.5 from an upwardly revised 126.8 in November, according to data released on December 21 that missed the median projection in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The measure ...

Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron doubled down on his contested plan to transform the country’s pension system, saying in his New Year’s address that it’s a project for “justice and social progress.” The French leader’s intransigence clashes with defiant labour unions that staged a 27th straight day of strikes to protests his plans, despite calls for a truce at Christmas ...

They were 235 days that shook the world, rattled China’s regime and refuted the most pernicious wishful thinking since the appeasement of dictators collapsed eight decades ago. Nothing more momentous happened in 2019 than Hong Kong’s heroic insurrection. It began with the April 3 introduction by Beijing’s Hong Kong satraps of an extradition bill that would have facilitated the sweeping ...