Bloomberg Ukraine’s anti-establishment political turn is poised to accelerate in Sunday’s snap general elections, with ex-comedian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s movement on track to sweep traditional forces out of power. Half a decade after street protests that toppled Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych, Zelenskiy has tapped into voter anger over the lack of progress in flushing dirty officials out of state institutions ...

Bloomberg Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned attacks that killed 37 people in the Goronyo community in the northern state of Sokoto. “This frequent and large scale killings of poor villagers by gangs of mass murderers must be met with the fiercest force the government can mobilise,” the president said in a statement emailed by his spokesman Garba Shehu, without stating ...

Bloomberg National Security Adviser John Bolton has left for Japan and South Korea as the US faces a range of issues in the region from trade tensions between its two allies to North Korea’s threat to scrap nuclear talks. Bolton “departed for Japan and South Korea to continue conversations with critical allies and friends,” Garrett Marquis, spokesman for the National ...

Bloomberg Taiwan’s presidential election next year will be a test of its democracy and value system, President Tsai Ing-wen said at the end of a US trip that drew rebuke from China. “Voters in Taiwan will be focussed on the future of our country, especially whether we can keep our democratic and freedom way of life,” she said at a ...

Bloomberg China issued a defense of its policies in the Xinjiang region where its detention of ethnic Uighurs has drawn criticism from the US and other western nations. Xinjiang is an “inseparable part” of China, and internal and external hostile forces including separatists, religious extremists and terrorists are distorting history and facts to split the country apart, the official Xinhua ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve is preparing to deliver what the market expects to be the first of multiple interest-rate cuts. The others are sure to follow if policy makers can’t break what’s starting to look like a vicious circle. The Fed isn’t simply bending to the market’s will with this cut: It highlighted the risks of weak inflation and global ...

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley, the biggest stock-trading shop on Wall Street, is losing some of its lead. The company posted a 14 percent drop in equities-trading revenue, the steepest decline among major US banks, as it cited lower client balances in its prime-brokerage business. While the firm had a surprise jump in wealth-management fees, the trading slump caused overall revenue to ...

Bloomberg Nordea Bank Abp said the pressure of negative interest rates and a tougher regulatory environment will force it to review its financial targets this year after delivering a set of quarterly results it characterised as “not satisfactory.” The environment has changed, “with expected lower rates for longer,” Nordea said. On top of that, management is awaiting “more clarity on ...

Bloomberg A German smartphone bank backed by billionaires Peter Thiel and Li Ka-shing has raised new funds at a valuation of $3.5 billion, making the company one of Europe’s highest valued non-listed fintech firms. N26 GmbH extended its Series D funding round by $170 million to a total $470 million, the Berlin-based company said. The round was originally announced in ...

Bloomberg A 78 percent drop in Yes Bank Ltd shares since August has left founder and former chief executive officer Rana Kapoor some $1 billion poorer. The Indian lender, which reported earnings that showed its capital buffers had weakened and bad loan ratio widened, plunged as much as 20 percent. That’s contributed to a drop in Kapoor’s net worth to ...