Bloomberg The past months have been brutal for the UK’s retail and consumer industries, and one bank that’s felt its fair share of the pain is HSBC Holdings Plc, which has found itself on the wrong side of several of the highest-profile failures. Last week, TV celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s casual-dining chain was placed into protection from creditors. That left ...

Bloomberg European Union leaders are about to begin their tussle over who should run the region’s monetary policy in the era after Mario Draghi. Heads of government will sit down for dinner in Brussels, in the aftermath of EU parliamentary elections, to kick off talks on the next suite of top political appointments. Among them is arguably the bloc’s most-powerful ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve’s influential staff seems to have lost confidence that its bosses will achieve the central bank’s 2 percent target, if the minutes of the Fed’s meeting are anything to go by. The staff forecast presented to policy makers saw inflation falling shy of 2 percent“over the medium term’’ even as the job market was projected to tighten ...