With Puerto Rico sweltering in the dark, restoring electricity as soon as possible is vital to averting a humanitarian disaster. The island’s long-term recovery, however, will depend not only on repairing its battered grid but on reforming its feckless power company. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the biggest public utility in the US, is notorious for its mismanagement and …

As she builds her new coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be mindful of the need to counter nationalism at home and the imperative of finding a consensus on integration in the euro zone. But the election also exposed a demographic rift that could present an even bigger challenge to Germany’s leaders: between a graying population that backed the …

Picking stocks is famously difficult. But just how difficult is one of the oldest arguments in finance. New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer reopened the debate last week with a piece describing a recent study by an Arizona State University business professor, Hendrik Bessembinder. Bessembinder looked at the performance of publicly traded stocks in the US from 1926 to 2016 …

A few months ago, no one would have noticed British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s address at the annual conference of his Labour Party. But that was before he engineered its biggest increase in vote share since World War II after Theresa May gambled on a snap election and lost her majority. The election, Corbyn told the Labour faithful, “has put …

KHOBAR / Reuters Saudi Arabia and Russia plan to set up a $1 billion fund to invest in energy projects, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said in a interview broadcast by Al Arabiya TV on Monday. The fund, to be finalised during this week’s visit by Saudi King Salman to Moscow, was part of efforts by two of the world’s …

Bloomberg Kuwaiti officials are considering an annual public spending cap of 21 billion dinars ($69.5 billion) on average over the next three fiscal years to help the government plan future debt sales, a senior official said. The cap is being included in a proposed budget for the fiscal year starting in April, the official said, asking not to be named …

Bloomberg China’s independent refiners burst onto the international oil market scene only a couple of years ago and lifted the nation past the US as the world’s No. 1 crude buyer. Now, a new generation of firms building some of the globe’s biggest plants are threatening to eclipse them. The original set of private processors, known as teapots, is clustered …

Bloomberg State-run generator NLC India Ltd is offering to reduce tariffs from two of its power plants after its main buyer asked the company to lower prices or shelve the projects, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter. NLC has offered to bring tariffs down by about Rs0.5 per kilowatt hour, taking a hit of 1.5 percentage point …

BENGHAZI / Reuters Libya’s giant Sharara oil field has been closed since late on Sunday, shutting off the production of more than 230,000 barrels per day (bpd), an engineer at the field and a Libyan oil source said. Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) said in a statement on Monday that it was “working towards a swift restart of production. At …

Reuters Qatar’s economic growth slowed in the second quarter to its lowest rate since the global financial crisis because of a sagging oil sector, and sanctions by Arab states, reports said. Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, expanded just 0.6 percent from a year earlier in the April-June period, the slowest growth since the 2009-2010 crisis. GDP grew 0.5 percent …