Bloomberg President Donald Trump offered public well wishes to Michael Flynn, hours before his former national security adviser is set to be sentenced for lying to investigators about his contacts during the 2016 campaign with the Russian ambassador. “Good luck in court to General Michael Flynn,” Trump said on Twitter. “Will be interesting to see what he has to say, ...

Bloomberg Long at the mercy of geopolitical forces, Hungary under Viktor Orban is looking to carve out its own sphere of influence. His power at home is secure after three consecutive landslide election wins and a growing group of like-minded anti-immigrant leaders are at his side in the European Union. So far unfazed by street protests in Budapest, Orban has ...

This week was a vivid demonstration of the inability of conservatives to deliver results after the great populist revolts in 2016 in Britain and America. And it showed that there is a golden opportunity for liberals in both countries to tackle the public concerns that motivated the mistaken decisions to vote for Brexit and President Donald Trump. To put it ...

It took Emmanuel Macron just one speech to ditch his entire strategy for shaking up the euro zone. Upon his election, the French president pledged to respect the monetary union’s budget rules to regain credibility with Germany. Fiscal consolidation and structural reforms weren’t just a way to strengthen the French economy, they were also the key to unlocking significant reforms ...

Asos Plc’s Monday-morning disaster is only the start of British retail’s Christmas nightmare. The online clothing seller issued a severe profit warning on Monday. The shares initially fell 35 percent, amounting to an 800 million-pound ($1 billion) loss. A range of other chains were also dragged down. To some extent, it’s a surprise that the first seasonal shocker has come ...

China’s top leaders meet this week in Beijing to set economic policy objectives for the coming year. The central question is whether they will do what they want or what the country needs. Clear evidence has emerged in the past couple of months that the Chinese economy is slowing to an uncomfortable degree. That’s raised expectations that the leadership will ...

Critics have called the resignation of India’s former central bank chief Urjit Patel and appointment of former Finance Ministry official Shaktikanta Das as his replacement a blow to the hard-won independence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Such fears are overblown. The changeover at the RBI is something else entirely: an opportunity to rebuild the central bank’s badly damaged ...

Whenever a Japanese company acquires an overseas asset, the rationale is typically that it’s finding a way to survive the country’s aging demographics and shrinking returns. But Hitachi Ltd’s 800 billion yen purchase of ABB Ltd’s power grid business is bigger than that. The Hitachi-ABB deal, while on the expensive side, is high-margin for the Japanese industrial conglomerate, and could ...

It seems like every asset bubble has a famous anecdote of someone claiming, right at the top, that a crash is impossible. In the stock-market bubble leading up to the Great Depression, it was economist Irving Fisher, who declared in the New York Times that stocks “have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few days before a ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank’s purchase of almost 180 billion euros ($204 billion) of corporate bonds has upended the region’s credit markets, even if some fast-moving indicators are back to pre-intervention levels. Metrics such as spreads and the number of negative-yielding bonds have largely returned to levels seen in early 2016, before the ECB announced plans to start buying corporate ...