If you want an unequivocal example of how Brexit has hurt the British taxpayer, look at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Since its record-breaking bail-out in the financial crisis, the Scottish lender has struggled to get back on its feet. It tried shrinking its trading businesses, shedding assets and eliminating costs — only to be stymied by a string ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell tried to thread the needle between dovish and hawkish at his press conference, but realistically had no hope of pleasing market participants who thought a series of interest-rate cuts were already in the bag. The Fed just isn’t there yet. This reduction in rates was the insurance against bad outcomes. Going forward, conditions will need ...

Boris Johnson is playing the part of the “madman” negotiator to a tee. The new British prime minister insists he will take his country out of the European Union on October 31 with either a completely new withdrawal deal or none at all — however high the economic cost. With Johnson refusing to even meet his EU counterparts until they ...

As if the luxury goods industry didn’t have enough to worry about with the troubling developments in its key Asia markets, Hugo Boss AG has raised the specter of things going wrong in America too. The maker of smart suits said that its sales (when excluding currency movements) and earnings growth would be at the lower end of its anticipated ...

Every so often you see someone demand that leaders abandon their focus on gross domestic product in favour of other metrics of economic success. Some countries are actually trying to do this; for example, New Zealand just introduced a happiness index (Bhutan did something similar two decades ago). But modifying GDP is probably more trouble than it’s worth. GDP does ...

Bloomberg In a week when just a few words from Jerome Powell and Donald Trump were enough to send stocks reeling, it’s easy to conclude their pronouncements are all that matter to markets right now. But something else keeps showing it can sway prices: bad earnings. While investors clearly were glued to every word from the central bank and president, ...

Bloomberg Chinese authorities proposed rule changes that would for the first time allow local investors to buy shares of some popular technology companies listed in Hong Kong — including, potentially, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The country’s stock exchanges published draft regulations that would bring stocks with different classes of voting rights into the trading links between the mainland and the ...

Bloomberg This week looms as a key one for Asian financial markets with no less than five central banks set to hand down decisions that may set the tone for the rest of the year. Markets are predicting policy makers in India, the Philippines and New Zealand will all cut interest rates to shore up faltering growth, while those in ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, which has been working to improve its technology, faced a systems outage in which email was unavailable for thousands of employees. “Earlier, we experienced an email outage that impacted DB employees in the Americas region. We have since resolved the issue and restored access for employees,” Deutsche Bank spokesman Troy Gravitt said in a statement. Trading ...

Bloomberg The Swiss franc advanced to its strongest level against the euro since 2017 after US President Donald Trump escalated trade tensions with China and fueled demand for haven currencies. The franc dipped below the crucial 1.10 threshold against shared currency, which analysts at Commerzbank think could prompt the Swiss National Bank to intervene and curb the currency’s appreciation. Investors ...