Bloomberg Property investors cut or stopped purchases of commercial property in London this year as Brexit negotiations lurched from crisis to crisis. Spending on UK offices, malls and warehouses plunged more than 40 percent in the first two months of the year to 4.3 billion pounds ($5.6 billion), according to research firm Property Data. With less than three weeks left ...

Bloomberg Volkswagen AG aims to produce almost 50 percent more electric cars than it previously targeted, boosting a bet that has already strained profit margins. The world’s largest automaker now plans to build 22 million vehicles over the next 10 years, compared with an earlier goal of 15 million. Return on sales fell last year at the company’s three core ...

Fast-forward past next week’s critical Brexit votes in the UK parliament. If Britain ends up leaving the European Union (EU) without a deal, it will have to set its own independent trade policy for the first time in a generation. How would it mitigate the trade frictions it will face outside the bloc? Brexit supporters have a beguiling answer: eliminate ...

Remember when Japan was going to become the world’s biggest economy? Don’t laugh. Herman Kahn, the Rand Corp. futurist who partly inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove, predicted as far back as 1970 that Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) would overtake the US around the year 2000. Decades later, his prediction still seemed on track. Thanks in part to strength ...

Do you remember the National Security Agency (NSA’s) phone-records program? It was perhaps the most contentious of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and became the subject of a vicious multiyear imbroglio in Congress. Now the operation has been halted entirely — with barely a whimper. Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorised the government to collect a broad range of business records ...

Yet again, a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan appears to have been narrowly averted. As India looks ahead to its approaching election, the world’s biggest democracy should take care to draw the right lessons from the crisis. The great temptation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be to exploit and even inflame the country’s mood of militant ...

When a massive helium-filled airship designed by Flying Whales, a French manufacturer, takes to the air for the first time in 2021, it won’t be against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Instead, it’ll probably fly over Jingmen, a dusty farm and industrial town in central China where Flying Whales and state-owned China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co., Ltd. (CAIGA) ...

On March 7, Huawei Technologies Co. held a press conference to announce it’s suing the US government, arguing that a law passed last year barring the Chinese company’s equipment from certain networks is unconstitutional. A week earlier, its CFO Meng Wanzhou sued Canadian authorities alleging wrongful detention. Meanwhile, the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment maker has sought to recruit foreign journalists for ...

I’ll confess, despite the best efforts of Netflix, my exposure to Norwegian comedy is very limited. That said, the finale to the one show I’ve vaguely followed – “What to Do With All Our Oil Stocks?” – has a pleasing subtlety to it; a knowing wink; the faintest tug of a leg-pull. Roughly 16 months ago, Norway’s central bank advised ...

Bloomberg Denmark plans to let its financial watchdog impose fines without going via the courts, in order to speed up the process of punishing banks involved in money laundering. The decision, which still needs to be debated in the country’s parliament, is the latest step being pushed by Business Minister Rasmus Jarlov as he responds to a $230 billion dirty ...