Bloomberg After a cyberattack and a botched product launch spoiled Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc’s 2017, a pricing squeeze threatens to make this year almost as tough. The Slough, England-based maker of Nurofen painkillers said comparable sales will rise by only 2 percent to 3 percent in 2018, and profitability will be curtailed by deflationary conditions in the consumer-goods business. That ...

Bloomberg A Trump administration plan to replace food-stamp spending with boxes of “100 percent American grown food’’ landed on Congress’s doorstep with a thud. But the public attention heaped on the Agriculture Department’s plan to deliver “Harvest Boxes” to poor families also obscured the administration’s other efforts to cut the number of people eligible for the nation’s biggest food-aid programme. ...

Wedged between Brazil and Venezuela, Guyana could easily go unnoticed. It has fewer than 750,000 people and a per capita income of $4,300, half the regional average, qualifying it as the hemisphere’s third-poorest nation. At the moment, Guyana also might be its luckiest. Having struck big oil offshore starting in 2015, industry experts reckon total reserves at around 2 billion ...

Singaporeans have dodged the bullet of higher consumption taxes, at least for the next three years. They should thank their new BFF — the bond market. Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat left the goods and services tax, last raised to 7 percent in 2007, unchanged on Monday. Most commentators, including yours truly, had expected an increase after Prime Minister Lee ...

Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Standard Life Aberdeen Plc have fallen out after talks to merge their insurance businesses fell apart. But the two have left the door open to overcoming their differences and getting the deal back on track. News of the failed talks fills in some of the background to Lloyds’s announcement last week that it plans to ...

Almost two years after the UK voted to quit the European Union, and barely more than a year before the actual exit is scheduled to happen, an all but leaderless Britain is fumbling its way to disaster. The country needs to find a way to change course. There should be a second referendum as soon as possible. It was a ...

Fans of self-driving cars will have breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Uber and Google’s Waymo, two giants in the industry, have settled their intellectual-property lawsuit. This removes a huge distraction for companies, and freeing them up to focus on their own research. So that’s good. Driverless cars will be an incredible boon to society. They could ...

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated Haruhiko Kuroda to a second term as governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), he gave the central banker a gift that might hold the key to policy over the next five years. Far from simply pushing the Bank of Japan towards further easing, Abe has provided Kuroda with room to maneuver should ...

How committed are you to a belief system? Answering that question has the potential to reveal flaws in our thought processes about many things, from politics to economics to cultural issues. Whether you are committed to one big idea, or are fascinated by a variety of things might also determine how successful you are as an investor. I was reminded ...

Bloomberg Latvia’s banking scandal deepened as its central bank chief and representative to the European Central Bank faced accusations of repeatedly trying to extort money from a local bank, in a blow to the Baltic state’s reputation. The Latvian government has repeatedly demanded that Ilmars Rimsevics step down after the country’s anti-corruption agency arrested him over the weekend on suspicion ...