When running for reelection, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers stressed that, under his administration, India had become the world’s “fastest-growing large economy.” This was never much of an achievement; after all, the People’s Republic of China was in the midst of a significant slowdown even before the trade war. But even that no longer seems to be ...

The Dutch-based navigation company TomTom NV has discovered in the course of research for its 2018 traffic congestion index that the German cities with the highest and fastest-growing apartment rents are also the most congested. This finding contains an important message for city planners: Instead of trying to fight cars, perhaps it’s worth putting effort into building more housing and ...

Google made another acquisition for its cloud-computing business that competes with Amazon.com Inc. Each deal it does is a reminder of Google’s failures so far in this lucrative field and a potential warning sign to the software specialists that have thrived in the last decade. Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said that it was spending $2.6 billion to buy Looker, ...

Bloomberg For all the shine and sophistication, for all the jargon, robots and quants, financial markets are still only this: Buyers buying and sellers selling, times a billion. Behind every trade — perhaps far behind — there is an actual human person. Two, in fact. And because humans disagree a lot, markets do too. And do they ever disagree just ...

Bloomberg Middle East stocks generally advanced on Sunday, catching up with emerging-market peers, as traders returned to work following holidays. Gauges in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Egypt climbed following last week’s increase for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. Stock exchanges in the Arab world were closed for most of last week due to Eid al-Fitr, the holiday ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc expects the yuan to weaken past 7 per dollar in the next three months — a level the currency hasn’t breached in more than a decade. The bank revised its forecasts for the yuan against the dollar because it sees the currency’s decline as a natural offset to higher US tariffs, even if policymakers are ...

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) eased rules to give lenders laden with bad debt more time to resolve delinquent accounts and lifted a deadline for pushing defaulters into bankruptcy courts. The directive, which also covers shadow banks, gives lenders 30 days to review a delinquent account and a further 180 days to implement a resolution plan, loosening the ...

Bloomberg Retail banks have been slower to embrace blockchain technology and face greater challenges in reaping its potential benefits than their more adventurous co-unterparts in investment-banking world, according to new research from McKinsey & Co. Headwinds for retail lenders to adopt a shared system of distributed computer ledgers to manage day-to-day activities include a tougher regulatory environment for consumer finance ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) will lower its short-term interest rate to -0.3 percent from -0.1 percent in September to head off risks posed by an expected Federal Reserve rate cut, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in a research note. Fed cuts are now expected in September and December after escalating US-China trade tensions have raised the risk that ...

Bloomberg Mario Draghi’s insistence that he’s determined to revive euro-zone inflation with interest-rate cuts and renewed bond purchases if needed isn’t convincing investors. The European Central Bank president talked a tough game after policy makers extended their pledge to keep borrowing costs at record lows and announced more cheap loans to banks. Yet traders pared bets on a rate cut, ...