Across the federal government, the knives are officially out for big technology companies. Avoiding a bloodbath should be a priority. As Bloomberg News reported, the House Judiciary Committee is gearing up to investigate unfair business practices by platform companies, while the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have divvied up Silicon Valley’s big four — Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook ...

After the relatively weak performance of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the European Parliament election, the party’s leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is in trouble. There is a fear in the party that Chancellor Angela Merkel has messed up her succession, and Bloomberg News has even reported that Merkel herself doubts whether AKK, as she is known, is up to ...

The trade war needs to fire its PR team. The tussle between the US and China is being blamed for all manner of economic and financial developments. Some of these are only vaguely related to the tariff spat, or they reflect trends underway before US President Donald Trump ever heard of his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. In other areas, like ...

India aims to curb cash – but this time it wants to do it properly. A cashless society wasn’t the original goal of the country’s draconian currency ban in November 2016. But when an acute shortage of banknotes gave a fillip to digital wallets, that purpose was added as an afterthought to justify an act of farcical state overreach. The ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) can deliver bigger monetary stimulus if necessary, but needs to take care with its side effects on the financial system, said Governor Haruhiko Kuroda. The BOJ will ease further if momentum towards its 2 percent inflation target is lost, Kuroda said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Kathleen Hays in Fukuoka, Japan, where central ...

Bloomberg A marked slowdown in Asia’s third-largest economy pushed growth concerns to the top of the Reserve Bank of India’s agenda, suggesting more policy easing will follow its third interest-rate cut of the year. Governor Shaktikanta Das and the inflation-targeting RBI he leads is now squarely focussed on boosting investment and consumption after quarterly growth cooled to a five-year low ...

Bloomberg People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang said that no specific level for the yuan is important, and indicated confidence it will continue to be “relatively strong” once the noise of the trade war subsides. “There is obviously a link between the trade war and the movements of renminbi,” Yi said in an exclusive interview in Beijing, using the ...

Bloomberg Chile’s central bank stunned analysts by cutting its key interest rate by 50 basis points, the biggest reduction in a decade, saying the economy could grow faster without fuelling inflation. Policy makers reduced the benchmark rate to 2.5 percent, surprising all 18 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The analysts had expected borrowing costs to be left unchanged. The bank is ...

Bloomberg Fears are mounting at the European Central Bank (ECB) that investors are losing faith in the inflation outlook, in a self-reinforcing spiral that could force the institution to dig deeper into its stimulus toolkit. Staff at the euro zone’s national central banks are worried that inflation expectations are becoming “deanchored,” according to officials familiar with the matter. They cited ...

Bloomberg Ocado Group Plc is investing in a pair of vertical-farming ventures as the UK maker of online retail technologies branches out following its mammoth deal with Marks & Spencer Group. The company said it bought a 58 percent stake in Jones Foods Co, Europe’s largest operating vertical farm, based in Scunthorpe, England. Ocado will use its know-how in automation ...