Bloomberg Confidence among US homebuilders plummeted by the most since 2014 as the highest borrowing costs in eight years restrain demand, adding to signs of a cooling housing market that will weigh on the Federal Reserve’s debate over how far to raise interest rates. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index dropped eight points in November to ...

Bloomberg London’s stock of completed but unsold homes has surged by almost half this year as Brexit uncertainty and affordability issues dog the housing market. The number in the capital jumped to 2,374 units as of September 30, the most on record and up from 1,595 at the end of 2017, according to data compiled by Molior London. The borough ...

The world’s oldest political party has developed an aversion to discretion. The Democratic Party is manacled to an over-caffeinated base that believes that deft government can deliver parity of status to everyone while micromanaging the economy’s health care sector, which is larger than all but three other foreign nations’ economies. Inconveniently, the party must appeal to voters who, living in ...

When the forecasts landed earlier this fall for the holiday shopping blitz, all signs pointed towards a merry Christmas for retailers. But last week, major chains such as Macy’s Inc., Walmart Inc., Nordstrom Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc. saw their shares whacked after publishing third-quarter earnings results. Was that a signal that something has gone off course? I don’t think so. ...

The appetite for low-cost passive funds is driving evolution at both ends of the scale in the asset management business. The biggest firms need to add more exotic products which can still command higher fees than their vanilla funds. And that means there’s an opportunity for smaller specialist managers to sell themselves to their larger brethren. Sushil Wadhwani is selling ...

If the British parliament throws out the deal that Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has negotiated with the European Union (EU), it will be most regretted in Brussels, because the deal in its existing form essentially insulates Europe from most of the Brexit fallout. There’s a reason Donald Tusk, the European Council president, hurried to call a meeting of EU ...

China’s vaunted economic managers aren’t infallible — and they’re currently making a familiar mistake. They are trying to accomplish too many objectives simultaneously, many of which conflict with each other. Instead of engineering a recovery, the resulting confused policy mix is only feeding a growing feeling of uncertainty among Chinese markets, businesses and households. That will continue to depress growth ...

The world’s policy makers need to disentangle their feelings about Donald Trump from their efforts to address the challenges facing the global economy and US-Asia relations. It’s a tall order, but there are signs that they might be making progress. Over the past year, I’ve been to a lot of conferences where everyone was focused on Trump and the disruptions ...

Not long ago, an explanation developed about Facebook Inc.’s two-plus years of crises. The theory went that Facebook’s failures to spot foreign propaganda on the social network, to weed out viral misinformation, and to protect people’s digital information all had a common cause: Facebook’s leaders were too trusting and too optimistic to predict how the social network could be twisted ...

Bloomberg Stocks fell from London to Shanghai and US equity futures signaled the global rout led by technology shares would deepen on Tuesday, adding pessimism to markets already anxious over trade. Treasuries advanced and the dollar edged higher. Contracts on all major US equity indexes pointed to declines at the open, with megacap tech shares leading the drop. The Stoxx ...