Bloomberg Walmart Inc jumped after reporting coronavirus-related stockpiling led to a surge in quarterly sales, underscoring the company’s strong position amid widespread carnage in the US retail sector. Comparable-store sales, a key retail metric, increased 10% for US Walmart stores in the period, compared with the 8.6% estimate compiled by Consensus Metrix. That’s the fastest pace of growth in almost ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s management said the need for a multibillion-euro coronavirus bailout was becoming urgent as talks with the government in Berlin drag on. In a letter to employees, the airline warned cash reserves continued to shrink while it negotiates the 9 billion-euro ($9.9 billion) rescue package. Lufthansa’s board said it hoped the government would find the “political will” ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump delivered a pair of personal and political gestures this week that seized on his core voters’ mistrust of international institutions and skepticism of science, heightened amid the coronavirus pandemic. The president threatened to withdraw from the World Health Organization, escalating his accusation it’s beholden to China. The move came hours after he revealed he was taking ...

Bloomberg Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the presidential primary in Oregon on May 19, according to the Associated Press. Biden is the only candidate actively seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, but Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as well as Representative Tulsi Gabbard were also on the ballot. Sanders, who won Oregon in 2016, endorsed Biden but is still ...

Bloomberg China denounced a rare message from Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Taiwan’s president as “wrong and very dangerous,” as tensions between the two sides flared anew over US overtures toward the democratically ruled island. The Ministry of National Defense said in a statement on Wednesday that the military would “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard” China’s sovereignty, ...

Bloomberg Mozambique called for regional help in fighting an emboldened group of insurgents in the country’s gas-rich north who’ve aligned with the IS. The appeal by President Filipe Nyusi is the government’s strongest admission yet that it’s struggling to contain an insurgency that began in 2017 and has grown rapidly in both sophistication and confidence in recent months. It’s temporarily ...

Bloomberg The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who campaigned on promises to lead for just one term, said he’d consider a second as the challenges facing his country have grown. “I’ll think about a second term,” Zelenskiy told a news conference on Wednesday in Kiev marking his first year in the job. “One term won’t be enough to complete the whole ...

Bloomberg Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he plans to use all of the $500 billion that Congress provided to help the economy through direct lending from his agency and by backstopping Federal Reserve lending programs. Mnuchin said he has pledged to use $195 billion of those funds so far, and will use the rest after determining how best to deploy ...

Bloomberg UK inflation slowed to the weakest level since 2016 in April as energy prices fell and the coronavirus lockdown put the brakes on economic activity. The prospect of persistently low inflation will fuel speculation that more action is needed from the Bank of England, intensifying the debate among policy makers over taking rates below zero for the first time. ...

Bloomberg Argentina and creditors seeking to hash out a $65 billion bond restructuring are still far apart, just days away from a deadline that could plunge the country into default. Talks have continued since bondholders sent two counterproposals, but there’s a gap of about 20 cents on the dollar between the government’s offer and the most aggressive creditors, according to ...