The changing nature of food retailing was laid bare last week with lower than expected UK sales growth at Tesco Plc and Amazon.com Inc. expanding its partnership with the smaller British chain Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc. Amazon’s agreement with Morrisons, while still fairly small right now, shows the ambitions of the online giant toward the UK, already one of the ...

It’s easy to sense signs of strain in the US economy: inversion of the yield curve, lackluster jobs data and an escalating trade war with China. It’s more difficult to gauge when a slowdown turns into a recession. Predicting its severity – mild or monstrous? – is even more difficult. Recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ...

Pakistan is flirting with a textbook emerging-market crisis. An unsustainable investment boom has ended. The central bank has raised interest rates to squeeze a current account gap. Growth has collapsed to a nine-year low; youth unemployment is in double digits; and inflation is getting there. Government revenues are stalling. Getting Islamabad out of its jam is once again the job ...

Haruhiko Kuroda won’t have it. The widespread notion that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is out of ammunition is nonsense, according to its governor, who says he still has the capacity to do grand things. Just look at his counterpart at the European Central Bank (ECB). “Like Mario Draghi, I think we can do these things if necessary,” Kuroda said ...

It wouldn’t take much for Apple Inc. to have US-sold iPhones made outside China. Foxconn Technology Group, the primary assembler of the devices, said that it has enough capacity to make all iPhones bound for the US outside of China if necessary. Apple hasn’t given the Taiwanese company such instructions, a senior executive of Foxconn’s listed flagship Hon Hai Precision ...

Bloomberg Rising tensions in the Gulf region aren’t stopping foreign investors from supporting Saudi Arabian stocks, just four years after funds from abroad were first allowed to trade directly in Riyadh. International funds helped contain losses in the final trading session last week, when Gulf stocks were sold off amid escalating tensions in the region. Qualified foreign funds have been ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s short-term borrowing costs haven’t been this high for a decade, and the impact is starting to show on the city’s financial markets. The tightness has weighed on demand for stocks at a time when street clashes have undercut sentiment towards the city’s assets. A gauge of Hong Kong property companies tumbled the most in five months as ...

Bloomberg When it’s all done, when the bulls have been broken, historians will look back and have something definitive to say about this rally’s causes and consequences. Until then, we must settle for theories. In a baffling week, oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf, America blamed Iran, and US stocks rose. President Donald Trump threatened to slap sanctions on ...

Bloomberg The boast by People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang this month that he has “tremendous room” to adjust policy could soon be tested as the economy slows, throwing attention on the impact on the nation’s fragile currency and financial markets. Compared to European and Japanese peers, China does have more obvious policy space. Its benchmark one-year lending rate ...

Bloomberg Trade-reliant Thailand better get used to worrying about the export outlook if President Donald Trump wins a second term, according to an official who helps to decide the country’s policy interest rate. “The US-China trade war has haunted us,” Somchai Jitsuchon, a member of the Bank of Thailand’s (BOK) monetary policy committee, said in an interview. “And that may ...