Bloomberg House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters said Facebook Inc should cease work on its cryptocurrency project until the company addresses a series of unrelated “deficiencies” in its social-media business. Waters, speaking at a hearing featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg, cited Facebook’s misappropriation of users’ personal data, its role in allowing Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election and the ...

The aftershocks of President Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds in Syria are rumbling through the region, and a string of Lebanese officials told me last week that they fear they’re the next to be discarded by America. Lebanese politicians and security officials, in a series of off-the-record conversations, expressed concern about Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and the ...

A worldwide preference for bigger, heavier cars has led to a nearly six-fold increase in the number of SUVs on the road since 2010 — and made them the second-biggest contributor to the rise in carbon dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency reported. Only power generation is causing a bigger increase in emissions. SUVs are also the reason that oil ...

It’s not easy being the front-runner. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democratic presidential hopeful, has come under increasing attack from the rest of the pack for her backing of fellow candidate Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal and her disinclination to explain how she’d pay for it. They’ll continue to do so as they attempt to prevent her from ...

Germany’s refusal to use fiscal policy, in the form of a big and quick stimulus, to ward off recession is a serious problem for the global economy. This excessive caution is enshrined in a balanced-budget law known as the “debt brake.” Several other countries have been emulating it, or thinking about doing so. They shouldn’t. And Germany should reconsider the ...

Snatch-and-grab is the new hallmark of Indian finance. As a banker friend in Mumbai put it to me only half-jokingly, a unit of “grabbed” cash collateral in hand is worth more than two units of hypothetical receivables. Yet this is no laughing matter. Not only is opportunistic behaviour going to worsen India’s $200 billion-plus bad loan crisis, but now that ...

WeWork’s valuation keeps sliding. SoftBank Group Corp., its largest outside investor, is now targeting $8 billion through a rescue package it’s putting together, according to Bloomberg News. But Masayoshi Son ought to be careful. While the deal may set a floor under WeWork, it could also diminish his standing along with SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund. Mere months ...

“I am a classically trained engineer,” says Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, “and I firmly believe in regression to the mean.” Applying a concept from statistics to the randomness of today’s politics is problematic. In any case, Hurd, 42, is not waiting for the regression of our politics from the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum to something like ...

Bloomberg US equity-index futures dipped and European stocks struggled for traction as investors plowed through earnings reports without finding much to justify optimism for global growth. Treasuries and European bonds advanced broadly. S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average contracts fell after Caterpillar’s results missed analysts’ forecasts, sending the stock tumbling in pre-market trading. Contracts on the Nasdaq also edged ...

Bloomberg Equity investors clamouring for interest-rate cuts in emerging economies are getting a wake-up call: monetary easing is failing to revive growth impaired by the trade war. Any stimulus unlocked by lower interest rates is being outweighed by weaker local currencies because trade tensions between the US and China are boosting the dollar. The underperformance of emerging-market stocks relative to ...