Bloomberg A $4.7 billion jury verdict against Johnson & Johnson in July helped spark the company’s biggest annual share loss in a decade, spotlighting the potential cost of alleged health risks from its popular baby powder. But investors may have overreacted when a St. Louis jury sided with 22 women who claimed asbestos in the powder caused their ovarian cancer. ...

Bloomberg Jeffrey Gundlach said yet again that the US economy is gorging on debt. Echoing many of the themes from his annual “Just Markets” webcast, Gundlach took part in a round-table of 10 of Wall Street’s smartest investors for Barron’s. He highlighted the dangers especially posed by US corporate bond market. Prolific sales of junk bonds and significant growth in ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co said it will cut thousands of jobs, weed out slow-selling variants and potentially close entire factories in Europe, as the carmakers’s global cost-cutting drive targets a region that has been a drag on earnings for years. The manufacturer, which employs some 54,000 workers across the region mainly in Germany, the UK and Spain, will also review ...

Bloomberg PG&E Corp, the California utility giant facing billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities, may notify employees as soon as Monday that it’s preparing a potential bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the situation. The San Francisco-based utility owner is planning to send the notice to fulfill a state law that requires the company to alert workers at least ...

Bloomberg Danes may soon be able to get 30-year home loans at just 1.5 percent. That’s considerably less than many sovereign states pay to borrow for that period, including the US government. It’s not the first time Denmark’s mortgage-backed covered-bond market — the world’s biggest — has tested such extreme levels. It tends to occur when investors from Germany to ...

Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But because his party is Alternative for Germany (AfD), one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as he is socially. AfD is a Rorschach test for observers ...

Britons tucked into J. Sainsbury Plc’s value-priced turkey crowns, costing 9 pounds, over the festive period. But its disappointing performance risks turning the group itself into the feast for Britain’s other big supermarkets. Sainsbury said like-for-like sales across the group fell 1.1 percent in 15 weeks to January 5, missing analysts’ expectations for a 0.3 percent decline. True, the reporting ...

The recent presidential address and the response from Democratic Party’s leaders in Congress offered little prospect that the stand-off over President Trump’s wall will be quickly resolved. As yet, neither side looks ready to back down or seek compromise. For this to change, public opinion may need to shift. Encouragingly, last night’s exchange suggests it soon might — against Trump. ...

On the long list of leading indicators that market participants attempt to use to figure out where the economy may be headed, don’t overlook aluminum. Despite the many market-soothing words uttered by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and former chairs Janet Yellen and Ben S. Bernanke at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta, economic and market risks have ...

Equity markets have been rallying on the prospect that the trade-related cloud hanging over the global economy could be lifting. The S&P 500 index is up more than five percent, buoyed both by last week’s strong US jobs figures and the sense of momentum in talks between US and Chinese negotiators. The two countries can reach a deal they “can ...