Bloomberg Germany’s robust economic upswing extended into the fourth quarter, buttressing growth in the euro area as policy makers prepare to wind down stimulus. Gross domestic product in Europe’s largest economy increased 0.6 percent from the third quarter, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said on Wednesday. That’s in line with the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. The economy ...

Bloomberg Businesses in the Czech Republic are fretting over a debate about a new referendum law, warning it has the potential to trigger a vote on a Brexit-style departure from the European Union that would devastate the economy. The pushback from business came after Prime Minister Andrej Babis’s ANO party held talks last week on introducing referendums with a far-right ...

Bloomberg The euro-area economy maintained its robust growth pace at the end of last year, setting the stage for another solid performance in 2018 that may sway European Central Bank policy makers into winding down unprecedented stimulus. Gross domestic product increased 0.6 percent from the previous three months, Eurostat reported on Wednesday, confirming a Jan. 30 estimate. Growth slowed in ...

Bloomberg With no let-up in sight for listed UK real estate agents, the companies could find themselves the targets of a wave of M&A activity. So say industry analysts and executives, who note that traditional high-street players like Foxtons Group Plc and Countrywide Plc face a stagnant housing market while losing market share to online competitors. Investors are running out ...

The election of President Emmanuel Macron in France last spring increased the odds of a unified European economic policy. He has expressed interest in moving to pan-European fiscal policy measures, eventually leading to pooling debt across countries under a common finance minister. The events of recent weeks have nudged the region in this direction. Developments in Italy and Spain — ...

What goes up, must come down. What goes up fast must come down even faster. Except Hong Kong property, perhaps. The breakneck growth of China’s private-sector conglomerates has gone into reverse as authorities recoil at the buildup of debt their overseas shopping sprees have caused. The degree of pain inflicted by that great unwinding depends on the assets being sold. ...

Pharma’s pricing power just isn’t what it used to be, and it’s probably not going to recover any time soon. Pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Express Scripts Holding Co. last week reported a record-low 1.5 percent increase in drug spending by commercial health insurance plans in 2017. It also said per-beneficiary drug spending fell for many commercial plans and gave a ...

Ignore the flim-flam, and President Donald Trump is offering some good ideas with his infrastructure proposal. The question is whether it’s too little, too late. Broadly, the plan envisions spending $200 billion to stimulate investment by states and businesses, with a goal of restoring roads, bridges and so on. It also aims to simplify regulation. With customary modesty, the White ...

Remember “war”? That thing where countries would gather up a bunch of people, give them weapons, and have them slaughter each other and pillage the countryside? For most of the past 3,000 years, war was a more-or-less constant feature of human life. Psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, chronicles the ...

Can recycling save the world from a looming shortage of cobalt? The idea has sound precedent. Lead — an essential ingredient in traditional car batteries, just as cobalt will be for the coming generation of lithium-ion cells — is probably the most extensively recycled industrial raw material on earth. With cobalt demand from cars, electric buses and utility-scale batteries set ...