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EU unveils plan to become ‘climate neutral’ by 2050

Bloomberg The European Union unveiled its long-term vision on combating climate change in a push for more ambitious action on the environment just days after US President Donald Trump rejected his government’s warning on the economic costs of global warming. The 28-nation bloc, responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, set a 2050 perspective to help give direction to ...

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Microsoft beats Apple to become world’s most valuable firm

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp surpassed Apple Inc to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. All it took was a $300 billion rout. After briefly claiming the top spot, Microsoft shares rose 0.6 percent, pushing the company’s market value to $828.1 billion at the close. That exceeded by more than $1 billion the value of Apple, which has tumbled this ...

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Trump threatens to cut GM’s subsidies

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s threat to cut subsidies to General Motors Co in retaliation for the automaker’s plan to close US factories was met with immediate skepticism. While it’s true that GM, like other US automakers, has received substantial federal assistance over the years — including a nearly $50 billion bailout in 2009 — experts cast doubt on the idea ...

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UK house prices increase despite Brexit concerns

Bloomberg London’s decade-long housing boom may have been cooled by Brexit, but the property market in the rest of the UK is largely shrugging it off. While home prices in the capital have risen only 1.7 percent since the June 2016 vote, those in Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, have jumped almost 15 percent, according to Hometrack. Manchester is close behind ...

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IBM CEO blasts data use by Silicon Valley

Bloomberg International Business Machines Corp Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined a growing chorus of tech executives lambasting web platforms, like Google and Facebook Inc, over their collection of user data and urged governments to target regulation at those companies. Without naming company names, Rometty pointed to the “irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platform companies” ...

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Was Great Recession worse than the Great Depression?

Here’s today’s economic quiz: Was the 2007-09 Great Recession more damaging than the Great Depression of the 1930s? Surely the answer is “no.” In the 1930s, unemployment reached 25 percent. By contrast, the recent peak in the jobless rate was 10 percent. Case closed. Not so fast, objects economist J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley. “Fifty years ...

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Trump-Xi will make us forget G-20

This weekend’s G-20 summit in Argentina will likely demonstrate what does and doesn’t work for this multilateral format, but also for international policy gatherings more generally. Despite weakening and diverging global economic growth, the aspiration for the larger discussions among leaders representing about three-quarters of global gross domestic product has been reduced to issuing bland joint commun- -iques — and ...

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Deliveroo’s banker boss takes a $4bn Uber ride

Will Shu, Deliveroo’s chief executive, is a former investment banker. So he probably knows how to cook up deal interest in a food delivery company whose riders have become a feature of British city streets. Indeed, back in September, scoops from Bloomberg News and the Daily Telegraph indicated that both Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. had held early acquisition ...

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Emerging markets will step out of Fed’s shadow

Gloom is dissipating for emerging markets, and they can thank American influence. There’s a lesson there, and a payoff. With the Federal Reserve approaching a pause in its interest-rate increases, pressure on nations like Indonesia will lighten significantly. No longer will they have to hike interest rates to buttress local currencies; they may conceivably get scope to cut. That’s a ...

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