Margrethe Vestager, famous for slapping vast fines on the likes of Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google during her tenure as the European Union’s top antitrust official, has been given the chance to do it all over again. She’s been handed the same job in Ursula von der Leyen’s proposed European Commission. Lest it be seen as some kind of ...

The maker of Aston Martin sports cars is considering raising cash from an expensive corner of the bond market. The hope must be that this is just one part of a more radical attempt to strengthen its finances — and not the last resort. Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc is looking at issuing an unsecured junk bond that’s rated ...

Europe is getting its own version of Softbank Group Corp. with the Amsterdam listing of tech investment firm Prosus NV. The move will likely help it avoid the fate of Yahoo Inc., the erstwhile Silicon Valley titan which has since fizzled away as a holding company. South African media and internet firm Naspers Ltd. has spun most of its technology ...

Of all the ideas that presidential candidates are offering to address the country’s economic woes, here’s one of the worst: Taxing, or even outlawing, automation. Many people worry about the prospect of automation causing mass unemployment. This might be justified in the science-fiction future, if machines learn to do anything a human can do. But there’s no sign that the ...

In the airline business, there’s nothing more damaging to a company’s internal harmony than making a profit. The pilot strikes that have grounded almost all British Airways flights for the next two days are a case in point. Unlike most industrial sectors, the usual state of affairs for airlines is spending vast sums of money for little return. In one ...

It has always been hard to measure poverty, because poverty is as much a state of mind as a condition of material well-being. Still, we seem to have made a bad situation worse. Consider the Census Bureau’s latest estimates. In 2018, the official poverty rate was 11.8%, down from 12.3% in 2017 and the lowest rate since 2001. This translates ...

Bloomberg US index futures edged lower with European stocks while Treasuries continued higher as investors weighed the fallout from a drone attack on one of the world’s biggest oil facilities and the record surge in crude prices that followed. Contracts on the three main US stock indexes dipped after fluctuating earlier. The Europe Stoxx 600 index ticked lower, led by ...

Bloomberg China’s restrained approach to easing spooked financial markets on Tuesday, with stocks and the yuan dropping the most in weeks. The Shanghai Composite Index retreated 1.7 percent, its biggest decline in more than two months, to close below the psychologically important 3,000 level. The onshore yuan fell 0.37 percent, the most in three weeks, to 7.0950 a dollar as ...

Bloomberg The Hong Kong dollar became the ninth most traded currency in the world earlier this year, ranking just below the yuan, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The city’s currency accounted for 3.5 percent of global average daily turnover in April, compared with 1.7 percent during the same month in 2016, the latest triennial survey by BIS ...

Bloomberg China will need to spend $2.9 trillion on new aircraft and ground services over the next two decades, according to Boeing Co, which continues to pin hopes on the world’s second-largest economy as its trade dispute with the US rolls on. The estimate, released in Boeing’s annual outlook on China’s commercial aviation market, is 7 percent higher than last ...