Here’s a new twist in the Robert Mueller saga: A former top Senate staffer for Attorney General Jeff Sessions is nearing confirmation to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Should his appointment worry people who want to protect the special counsel’s independence? As with any issue involving Mueller and the Trump White House, the answer reflects the supercharged atmosphere surrounding ...

Forecasting the long-run return on equities is one of the key challenges in financial planning. Jeremy Siegel, the author of “Stocks for the Long Run,” wrote that he had examined 210 years of stock returns and found that “the real return on a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks has averaged 6.6 percent per year.” Public pension funds make similar assumptions. ...

It looks a victory for aggrieved bondholders. Aviva Plc has had enough bad press and has kicked controversial plans to cancel its preference share class into the long grass. The decision isn’t entirely charitable. The British insurer may also have been influenced by the fact that likely cost of issuing new perpetual debt was beginning to tick up. But this ...

As part of its continuing campaign to prevent China from stealing American intellectual property, President Donald Trump’s administration is considering restrictions on the number of Chinese citizens enrolled at US colleges and universities. Targeting foreign students will undermine US competitiveness, not enhance it. Of the 1 million foreign nationals enrolled at US schools, nearly one-third are from China — double ...

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence — or ‘robots’ in common parlance – is whether they will make human workers obsolete. ...

Communication received loud and clear. The Bank of England (BOE) did just enough to keep interest rate expectations alive for a hike in its key interest rate in May to 0.75 percent — and beyond. The switch to a 7-2 vote at March 22 policy decision, with the most voluble hawks Michael Saunders and Ian McCafferty reverting to wanting an ...

I think I understand why Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t publicly responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He’s stuck in a catch-22. Any fix for Facebook’s previous big problem — fake news — would make the current big problem with data harvesting worse. As a media company and one of Americans’ top sources of information, Facebook’s de facto ...

Bloomberg Banks that spent years lobbying against billions of dollars of new capital requirements are being rewarded for their efforts. They won concessions from global regulators that may cut the amount of extra capital the industry’s biggest companies will need in 2022, when the new market-risk rules are due to take effect. The proposed revisions will come as a relief ...

Bloomberg For Australian banks the jabs just keep coming — and not always from the most expected sources. Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ Bank) is facing a civil suit in Guam over lending standards at its American Samoa offshoot. Two retired US military veterans claim the Melbourne-based bank is liable for “systematic violations of the Truth in ...

Bloomberg Developments in fintech could boost the UK’s sluggish productivity growth and the Bank of England has started a unit to monitor its developments, Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said. “We have set up a new Fintech Hub that will sit at the heart of the bank, to consider both how the bank understands and how it applies fintech, relevant to ...