Standard Chartered Plc investors should be careful what they wish for. Shares in the emerging markets lender rose on March 3 after Bloomberg News reported that Chairman Jose Vinals has informally approached banking executives to gauge interest in replacing Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters, who’s about to complete five years at the Asia-focused bank. StanChart responded to the story by ...

China is poised to let some of its biggest state-owned entities help develop a giant West African iron-ore deposit that’s been tantalizingly promising and painfully problematic for two decades. Whatever happens next, this watershed moment for the steelmaking commodity is bad news for big producers, particularly Rio Tinto Group. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission is actively pushing forward ...

When it comes to infectious disease outbreaks, we just haven’t learned. It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Last year, a report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a body put together by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Bank Group, said that there was “a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a ...

A good deal becomes a great deal in a market that has suddenly turned. The Agnelli family’s agreement to sell PartnerRe Ltd. to French insurer Covea for $9 billion may fall short of what investors were hoping for last month. But to ink an all-cash disposal at this price is some achievement — even if the buyer is rich and ...

If you’re raining cash on people and want them to spend it, you have to convince them that the benevolence is being financed by printing money. Nobody wants to worry about being taxed more in the future. These things are going to be problematic for Hong Kong Financial Secretary (HJFS) Paul Chan. He plans to give away HK$10,000 to every ...

Bloomberg As Chinese factories hit by the coronavirus look to restart production, the pain is only beginning for carriers that rely on steady shipments of Asian smartphones. AT&T Inc is bracing for handset shortages across the US. A carrier in the UK and one in France are already dealing with supply disruption and could run out of some popular models, ...

Bloomberg Tech giants continue to drop out of this month’s South by Southwest festival over coronavirus concerns, threatening an event that typically serves as one of the industry’s most influential gatherings. Apple Inc said that it wouldn’t be attending the conference, which kicks off on March 13 in Austin, Texas. The iPhone maker and streaming-video provider had planned to debut ...

Bloomberg The chief executive of Lego A/S says the novel coronavirus only represents a short-term blow to China’s economy that won’t change the toymaker’s expansion plans in its fastest growing market. Lego reported record sales and said growth in 2020 will once again be led by China. It’s targeting almost 60% more stores there this year, bringing the number to ...

Bloomberg Pressure is building for interest-rate cuts that could push emerging economies into a quagmire of runaway inflation and currency weakness. That’s because average real yields in emerging markets may have already turned negative, if first-quarter inflation projections are any indication. Even bigger economies such as India, Taiwan and Turkey offer bond returns below price growth, leaving little room for ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India (SBI) said it will immediately invest 24.5 billion rupees ($332 million) in Yes Bank Ltd. as part of a central bank-backed rescue plan for the embattled lender. SBI, the country’s largest bank, won’t ask the federal government for capital to fund the rescue and may instead work with other investors, Chairman Rajnish Kumar told reporters ...