Singapore appears to be shutting its doors to foreign talent just as the exodus of expatriates from Hong Kong gathers pace. The government recently tightened visa rules for white-collar workers, adding hoops to a process that employers already complain is too onerous. Will the city-state miss its golden opportunity to scoop up Hong Kong’s disgruntled elites? Hardly. It’s a different ...

  At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable. A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and destruction, but wrong about being unthinkable. The Great War ...

  Corruption is “a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy,” said a certain vice president, back in 2014. Now commander in chief, Joe Biden must confront a corruption problem unfolding on his watch: the spiraling costs of misspent Covid funds. In recent court filings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described a “massive fraud scheme” in ...

Bloomberg A six-ton unmanned reconnaissance drone that streaked across eastern Europe from war-ravaged Ukraine and crashed in the Croatian capital has raised awkward questions about Nato’s readiness to protect European airspace. Startled authorities are asking how none of the three North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) member states — Romania, Hungary and Croatia — reacted as the Soviet-era Tu-141 traversed their ...

Bloomberg Police in Slovakia, a Nato and European Union (EU) member bordering Ukraine, detained four people suspected of spying for Moscow and expelled three Russian diplomats in response. Russia paid the suspects “tens of thousands of euros” for sensitive or classified information, Special Prosecutor Daniel Lipsic told journalists, a day after the detentions and the diplomats’ expulsion. Two people were ...

  Bloomberg European banks operating in Russia are preparing to separate those business from their main computer systems to reduce their vulnerability to cyber-attacks following the invasion of Ukraine. Commerzbank AG is preparing to cut off its Russian unit from its system as one potential scenario and already has the ability to rapidly sever the connection through what’s internally known ...

  Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co raised Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Charlie Scharf’s pay 20% for 2021, a year in which profit recovered and shares advanced more than most of the bank’s rivals. The board paid Scharf $24.5 million for his second full year atop Wells Fargo, up from $20.3 million for 2020, according to a filing. The package consisted ...

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc is setting up a new hub in Malaga, Spain, where it plans to hire 30 analysts, as part of the banking giant’s efforts to retain staff. The lender hopes the Andalusian city, with more than 8 miles (13 kilometers) of coast line along the Mediterranean Sea, will offer employees a better work-life balance and help curb ...

  Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc has agreed to sell its 15 Greek bank branches to Pancreta Bank SA, the latest move by the lender to cut back some of its operations outside of Asia. Subsidiary HSBC Continental Europe has reached an “in-principle agreement to sell its branch operations in Greece,” according to a statement. No financial terms were disclosed and ...

  Bloomberg Standard Bank Group Ltd is in talks with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) to exit the two banks’ UK-based joint venture and focus on growing operations on its home continent. ICBC Standard Bank was created in 2015, when the company sold a 60% stake of its London-based Global Markets business to Chinese giant. The combination sought ...