What is Amazon.com Inc., exactly? If you answered “an online book retailer,” then you haven’t been paying attention for like, oh, the past decade or so. What seems like a straight-forward question is actually a much more complex and surprising inquiry than you might have guessed. I began thinking about this earlier this year, when we looked at whether …

  Bloomberg China has targets for just about everything, from ethanol production to reaching Mars. Now the top economic planning body wants to get more tourists to hit the road, and has even announced targets for skydiving, water skiing and mountain climbing, as authorities push for more consumer spending to aid the economic transition away from old industrial drivers. The …

  Bloomberg An Indian green court ordered the country’s aviation safety regulator to ensure planes don’t dump human waste during flights, ruling on a plea by a New Delhi resident who claimed his neighborhood had to endure excreta that fell from the skies. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the safety regulator, should conduct surprise checks on aircraft when they …

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business Middle East has seen a tremendous rise in smartphone penetration rates and social media usage as the total number of Internet users has recently crossed a 100 million mark. Retailers are exploring ways to get more personal with their customers, through online offerings and social media interactions, to gain loyalty. A recent research by …

  Bloomberg Congestion is the biggest reason why LaGuardia Airport in New York is regularly rated the worst in America: Neither planes nor people move in an efficient manner through a facility designed for far, far less traffic. When it’s completed in summer of 2022, a gleaming new LaGuardia will be a modern space featuring a collection of aeries and …

  Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA will probably fail to lure sufficient demand for a 5 billion-euro ($5.2 billion) capital increase, leading to what would be the country’s biggest bank nationalization in decades, said people with knowledge of the matter. No anchor investor has shown interest in the stock sale, the Siena-based company said in a statement. …

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc plans to transfer its Thai retail-banking business to Thailand’s Tisco Financial Group Pcl next year, exiting an operation that the UK lender said lacked the scale to generate adequate returns. The net asset value is about 5.5 billion baht ($153 million), according to a stock exchange filing by Tisco on Thursday, which didn’t disclose a …

  Bloomberg The Philippines left its benchmark interest rate at a record low as emerging nations brace for a steeper tightening path in the US. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas kept the overnight reverse repurchase rate at 3 percent, it said in Manila on Thursday, as predicted by all 18 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Policy makers increased inflation forecasts for 2017 …

  Bloomberg The biggest Nordic bank just won approval to convert its subsidiaries into branches in a move that gives local regulators less say over their systemically important financial institutions. This week, the governments of Denmark and Norway said Nordea can convert subsidiaries (supervised locally) into branches (overseen from Sweden). The restructuring creates branches across the Nordic region that in …

  Reuters Kuwait’s central bank has issued new governance rules for Islamic banks, including requirements for external sharia audits, as regulators seek more transparency and accountability in the sector. Regulatory scrutiny over Islamic banks has been building as they now hold around a quarter of total banking assets in the Gulf, while in Kuwait that figure stands at around 40 …