Bloomberg The coronavirus outbreak is set to wipe out more than $10 billion from Indonesia’s tourism revenue this year as leisure travel comes to a near complete halt, the government said. The country is preparing stimulus packages for the industry and a safety net for workers to blunt the impact, President Joko Widodo said at a cabinet meeting. He predicted ...

Bloomberg Australia’s Airwallex Cayman Ltd raised $160 million from new investors including Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd and the venture-capital arm of Salesforce.com to accelerate its expansion in global payments. The fresh round from ANZ’s venture unit and Salesforce Ventures gives Airwallex a valuation of $1.8 billion, co-founder Lucy Liu said. Other participants included existing backers DST Global, ...

Bloomberg Just one kilogram of freshly caught squid a day was almost enough to live on for Thai fishermen like Wisut Boonnak. Now the catch has halved in price and he’s spending more time on village duties. “It’s the biggest price drop that I can remember,” said Wisut, who’s been fishing for the past 40 years off the southern Thai ...

Bloomberg The world’s top buyers of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are seeking to defer shipments as the coronavirus pandemic cripples demand and forces more of the heating and power fuel into storage that is nearing capacity. The move signals that efforts to contain the spread of the virus may impact energy consumption far into this year and possibly 2021, worsening ...

Bloomberg Enel SpA is looking for a financial partner to buy as much as 50% of its African renewable business as the Italian energy giant looks to extend wind and solar power projects across the continent. The search for a company to form a joint venture started before the coronavirus outbreak stalled the regional economy and will continue regardless, a ...

Bloomberg The worldwide coronavirus pandemic that’s caused oil demand to plummet has turned the Canadian oil patch’s biggest problem on its head. Rather than having too few oil pipelines, the province now has too many. The collapse in oil demand caused by people staying home has reduced US demand for Canadian crude, leaving pipelines struggling to stay full. After more ...

Bloomberg Even before the pandemic struck, outdoor air pollution was linked to the deaths of as many as nine million people each year. Now two new studies show that Covid-19 patients are more likely to die if they live in regions with high levels of air pollution. Air pollution affects human health in insidious ways. The burning of fossil fuels ...

Bloomberg Continental Resources Inc founder Harold Hamm told Texas oil regulators he expects neighbouring Oklahoma to adopt crude-production limits in a bid to bolster energy prices. Hamm’s comments came during a marathon hearing of the Texas Railroad Commission on whether to enact quotas amid the worst crude-market crash on record. Oklahoma, the fourth-largest US oil-producing state, plans to consider imposing ...

Bloomberg The International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants policy makers to avoid repeating the Depression-era mistake of ratcheting back budget deficits. Instead, it’s urging them to ramp up fiscal stimulus when the coronavirus contagion starts to abate. “Once the recovery has happened and we are past the pandemic phase, for advanced economies it would be essential to undertake a broad-based stimulus,” ...

Bloomberg Finland’s lockdown will cause gross domestic product (GDP) to shrink between 1.5% and 2.0% for each month that it is in place, the Finance Ministry said Thursday. The longer the restriction measures last, the slower the recovery will be, Mikko Spolander, director general of the Economics Department, told reporters in Helsinki. “The danger is that the longer the economy ...