Bloomberg Buying your sweetheart a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates could be cheaper this year thanks to booming cocoa supplies. Growers are collecting bigger harvests in Latin America and in West Africa, which accounts for about 70 percent of global production. The output gains have pushed cocoa futures to the lowest since 2008, cutting costs for companies including Mondelez …

  Bloomberg The average price of a UK home hit a new record in January, continuing an upward trend that’s in part being driven by a supply-demand imbalance. The 0.3 percent increase in values lifted the average to 300,169 pounds ($374,000), Acadata and LSL said in a report on Monday. Annual growth was 3.1 percent, and prices are now double …

  Bloomberg Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller sought to calm nerves at the German carmaker as festering disputes with labor leaders and allegations from former Chairman Ferdinand Piech threatened to disrupt efforts to overcome its diesel-cheating scandal. “You’re all certainly as irritated as I am, because Volkswagen needs something totally different now: namely, concentration in order to cleanly …