Bloomberg FirstEnergy Corp. rose the most in almost a decade after announcing a $2.5 billion equity investment by a group including Elliott Management Corp. As part of the deal, the Akron, Ohio-based utility owner is forming a “restructuring working group” that will seek to minimise the time needed to exit the unregulated power business, according to a statement. The company ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently raised its forecasts for global economic growth in 2018 and 2019 to 3.9 percent, which would be the fastest pace since 2011. That is good for global equities, of course, but it is particularly bullish for crude oil prices and industrial metals prices. It also means that a wave of monetary tightening is coming ...

Critics of Bitcoin often argue that it’s useless as a means of payment, one of the key elements of any successful currency. That’s not quite right, and likely to become less so. First, a reminder on how Bitcoin works. If I want to send someone some Bitcoin, I simply broadcast my intention to the network. I then wait for the ...

It’s bad form to bring up unpleasant things during bonus season. That’s one of the two reasons the Asian sell-side isn’t talking much about MiFID II. The other is copious liquidity. Make no mistake. Once the great bull market ends and equity trading volumes recede, the margin compression triggered by the European Union’s revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive will ...

The year ahead looks to be dangerous for health-care security in the US, as Donald Trump’s administration continues to sabotage the law that Congress couldn’t repeal. New proposals would let many more healthy Americans drop their Obamacare coverage — raising costs for the unhealthy and risks for everyone, sick or well. It will fall to state governments to resist this ...

The economics profession’s gender problems came to the fore last year. A number of people had been speaking up about the issue for a while, but this time the concern really boiled over. The spark was a paper by then-undergraduate Alice Wu, highlighting sexist language in an anonymous internet forum used by some economists. But the profession’s gender issues run ...

It is perhaps fitting that President Donald Trump’s salvo of tariffs on solar-power equipment was unleashed in a press release dropped late on Monday and sporting a headline that actually led with “large residential washing machines.” Why? Because, digging into the impact, the tariffs help to demonstrate one thing: Solar modules— blocks of cells that are put together to make ...

I began sharing my work online two decades ago as one of the early financial bloggers. I started on Yahoo Geocities in the 1990s, Typepad in 2003, and finally on WordPress at my own domain in 2008. That is where the Big Picture still resides. In those days, blogs had robust comment communities. They were a terrific source of discussion ...

Bloomberg As Nordea Bank AB blazes a trail in Europe by banning its employees from trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the regulator is taking a back seat in a decision-making process it says is better left to the industry. Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority thinks “every institution must decide on the details of their internal regulations specifying the rules for their ...

DUBAI / Reuters Citigroup has won formal approval from Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority to begin investment banking business there, the US bank said on Tuesday. More than a dozen foreign banks have licences to operate branches in Saudi Arabia, battling for business resulting from the kingdom’s reforms to wean its economy off oil revenues. Citi was among the banks ...