Bloomberg European investors who shunned London’s commercial property in the run-up to the Brexit referendum are flocking back as the weak pound cuts prices and electoral uncertainty on the continent makes the UK seem a good place for buyers to spread their bets. Investors from Europe plowed 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) into the capital’s offices, shops and warehouses …

  Voters in France’s presidential election are being asked to choose between supply-side economic reform, as offered by candidates like centrist Emmanuel Macron and center-right François Fillon, and demand-side reform, as promoted by the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon. The reality is that France needs both at the same time — one without the other won’t work. …

  India’s most valuable business is earning money hand over fist from oil. Yet what’s exciting investors about Reliance Industries Ltd. are its telecoms losses. Those should go some way toward creating the Indian equivalent of Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. wireless carrier. Or at least that’s what the stock’s 38 percent jump this year in dollar terms is …

  The global economy is gathering momentum, the International Monetary Fund has declared. That’s probably correct and undeniably encouraging, but there’s an ominous discord between this economic expansion and what’s euphemistically called “political uncertainty” — that is, the stresses caused by surging anti-trade, anti-market, anti-immigrant populism. This “uncertainty” could be the prelude to some seriously bad policies, enough to derail …

  For centuries, Afghanistan has been a cauldron of chaos, conflict and anarchy. But the chaos has not been created or opted by Afghans. It has been engineered, exported to, and planted in the country. The foreign invasions in past decades, insurgency and civil war have totally destroyed Afghanistan, which has been haunted by great game between big powers jostling …

  When it emerged last week that China Minsheng Banking Corp. had sold $436 million in suspect wealth-management products, fears rose of a collapse in the loosely regulated market for such products. It now looks like a more mundane case of forgery involving a branch manager. But that’s not exactly reassuring: In fact, it suggests a different kind of systemic …

  A recurring theme at Gadfly is Amazon.com Inc.’s ambitions to do everything under the sun. It looks as if the company now wants to become a quasi app store similar to Apple or Google’s mobile versions. Amazon has created a single spot for people to sign up to digital subscriptions from companies including the Los Angeles Times and digital …

  Officials may not say so directly, but the US appears to consider Germany a currency manipulator. Germany’s large trade surplus, the accusation goes, comes at the expense of US companies. So, as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble traveled to Washington on Wednesday for an International Monetary Fund meeting, he brought along an eight-page primer on the German current account …

  Bloomberg US stock futures jumped as blue chips from Caterpillar Inc. to McDonald’s Corp. reported results. Canada’s dollar led export currencies lower as a tariff on lumber reignited concern the Trump administration will pursue protectionist policies. Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied, indicating the underlying index may rise to an all-time high. Caterpillar climbed more than 6 …

  Reuters Stock markets in the Gulf most exposed to foreign trade held their ground on Tuesday, with Dubai and Qatar showing resilience in the face of disappointing results from blue-chip companies. In Dubai, shares of Emirates Integrated Telecommunications (Du) lost 3 percent after reporting a net profit of 364.9 million dirhams ($99.35 million) in the three months to March …