Bloomberg For much of the last 30 years Finland’s armed forces have looked a little old fashioned, still configured to fight a major land campaign in Europe as though the Cold War never ended. No more. As Finland readies to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) against the backdrop of Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945, in Ukraine, the Nordic ...

Bloomberg Fiji’s long-time leader, Frank Bainimarama, failed to win a majority in elections held last week, leaving the Pacific island nation facing a hung parliament and a period of uncertainty as political parties look to form coalitions. Bainimarama’s Fiji First Party won 26 seats in the vote, according to Fijilive.com and data from the Fiji Elections Office. That’s two short ...

  Bloomberg Leo Varadkar took over as Ireland’s PM, or Taoiseach, for a second time as part of a coalition deal struck after the 2020 election, with an urgent housing crisis at the top of his agenda. The Fine Gael leader was elected by the country’s parliament with 87 votes to 62 and appointed to the role by the president ...

  Bloomberg Initial public offerings are heading for their longest drought since the global financial crisis — and bankers don’t expect a revival anytime soon. A mix of rising inflation and interest rate hikes aimed at taming it have hurt stock market valuations and eroded investor appetite for the high-growth IPO candidates that have driven deals in recent years. Just ...

  Bloomberg Bitcoin dropped back below $17,000 and several smaller cryptocurrencies referred to as altcoins posted significantly steeper declines as concern increases that the digital-asset market’s woes are far from over. The largest token dropped as much as 3.7% to $16,762. Bitcoin reached its highest price since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire filed for bankruptcy last month. Ether declined as much ...

Bloomberg A cofounder of the OneCoin pyramid scheme pleaded guilty to his role in the global, multibillion-dollar fraud. Karl Sebastian Greenwood admitted OneCoin, which he founded in 2014 with Ruja Ignatova, the so-called “Cryptoqueen,” was based on a phony cryptocurrency. Greenwood, who was arrested in Thailand in 2018 and extradited to the US, pleaded guilty to three criminal counts of ...

  Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) in the coming week is widely expected to stick with the negative interest rates that set it apart from the world’s other major central banks. At the decision due on Tuesday, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will reiterate his out-of-sync stance that monetary stimulus must stay in place to secure lasting inflation. That’s in contrast ...

  Bloomberg Wall Street banks’ interest in crypto has significantly fallen off as digital-asset prices have tumbled, according to a top US financial regulator. “A lot of the crypto curiosity went away,” Michael Hsu, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Washington bureau. “I would be astounded if a lot ...

  Bloomberg Swiss National Bank (SNB) President Thomas Jordan has voiced support for Credit Suisse Group AG doing less investment banking, as the lender struggles to recover from billions in losses over the past two years, recent client defections and asset outflows with a strategy revamp. “We appreciate that Credit Suisse is focusing on its strengths,” Jordan told Swiss radio ...

  Bloomberg When a six-year-old boy first “woke up” the Gitamini robot, his parents were surprised he didn’t flinch — robots these days tend to be ominous. But as November leaves swirled around the sidewalk meet-cute, the squat personal droid gave a friendly “chirp” and popped up on its two large wheels, ready to follow a new friend. Service robots ...