Bloomberg Unite Group Plc agreed to buy fellow UK student-housing provider Liberty Living Group Plc for $1.8 billion in cash and shares. Unite is buying the assets from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which will have a 20 percent stake in the group when the deal is completed in the third quarter, according to a company statement. Unite proposed ...

Bloomberg An 18-month labour dispute at an aluminum smelter in Quebec controlled by Alcoa Corp ended after workers accepted a deal, defying the recommendation of their union’s leadership. About 80 percent of workers at the Becancour plant voted to ratify the offer after a meeting of the United Steelworkers in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, the union said. Alcoa said it expects the ...

Is there any method to Donald Trump’s madness on trade? Politicians and investors are all struggling to make sense of the US president’s tendency to stop, go, and reverse course in his dealings with China and Europe. Financial traders went to sleep basking in the glow of a trade truce with Beijing. They woke up to the news that the ...

Members of Congress are finally getting serious about protecting privacy online. If only they had some better ideas on how to do so. The latest entrant is a bill sponsored by Senators Josh Hawley and Mark Warner. Among other things, it would require big tech platforms such as Facebook and Google to tell users how much money their personal information ...

Step One complete for Tesla Inc.: Deliveries secured. The company reported second-quarter production and sales numbers after the market closed, and they were smack in the middle of guidance. With doubts about Tesla’s ability to hit its figures after the first quarter’s washout, delivering more than 95,000 vehicles — a record — provided the predictable shot in the arm for ...

Christine Lagarde, nominated to lead the European Central Bank (ECB), will need all her proven attributes, and help from others, to succeed as the new leader of one of the world’s three most systemically important central banks. An inspired choice, she is uniquely well placed to build on her accomplishments as the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. In ...

The world’s largest car market is grappling with a sharp slowdown. What’s the best remedy? China’s car sales and output have fallen dramatically every month since July 2018. Inventories are piling up, especially for autos that don’t comply with emissions regulations, which will kick in next month for a large part of the country. Beijing has pulled out all the ...

During election years such as this one, India’s outgoing finance minister offers up only an “interim budget,” under the assumption that the incoming government will have different policy priorities. Given that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was reelected so easily, one might think the budget it’s scheduled to present on July 5 won’t look much different. It should. Modi’s new ...

Exchange-traded funds have never quite been a perfect fit for the bond market. In fact, some of the main selling points of ETFs — real-time pricing, instant liquidity and the ability to trade at a low cost — run counter to some of the core tenets of traditional fixed-income investing. The buy-and-hold types don’t need to know precisely where their ...

Bloomberg US stocks advanced to fresh records in thin trading ahead of a holiday. The rally in global bonds extended as investors weighed the prospect of more dovish appointees to two of the world’s major central banks. Ten-year Treasury yields dipped to the lowest since November 2016 on rising market bets that the Federal Reserve will cut rates this month. ...