Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond barely uttered the B-word in the more than 70 minutes it took him to unveil the latest UK budget on Monday. Inevitably, though, Brexit was the elephant stomping around the room — or, rather, one of them. Exit negotiations with the European Union (EU) are stalled over a disagreement about how to keep ...

Watch out HSBC Holdings Plc. The digital banking revolution is coming for all the easy money the UK-based bank has long taken for granted. Hong Kong was HSBC’s birthplace as the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp., and the former British colony remains its single biggest market, a source of sticky deposits and ready borrowers. For now, that’s still boosting the ...

As 20 finalist cities in the US compete for the right to host Amazon’s second headquarters, Google has had to drop plans for a campus in Berlin after the project was rejected by residents and the leftist city government proved unenthusiastic. There are two ways of looking at this: It confirms a lasting US advantage over Europe when it comes ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan stayed the course on monetary stimulus while confirming in updated forecasts that it won’t meet its inflation target for years to come. The central bank left its policy interest rates and asset-purchase targets unchanged, while forecasting that inflation will remain below its 2 percent target until at least early 2021. This will leave it even ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank won’t make much progress raising interest rates because it’ll tighten just as the US economy slows, predicts Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Andrew Bosomworth. “I don’t think Europe will get very far above zero,” Bosomworth, a managing director at Pimco, said in an interview in Frankfurt this week. “There’ll be a very short window in which ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc is working on a three-year plan to improve profitability as a share slump this year puts pressure on the emerging markets lender to boost returns. While operating expenses fell by 1 percent in the third quarter and were below estimates, its key measure of profitability is still lagging. The bank said on Wednesday that it will ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is weighing acquisitions and joint-ventures for its asset management business to help it compete with larger rivals, people with knowledge of the matter said. Targets may include UK and US asset managers focussed on retail clients and specialised asset managers in areas such as real estate, the people said, asking not to be identified because the ...

Bloomberg India sought to defuse growing tensions with its central bank following reports that the government had cited a never-used legal provision in trying to resolve disagreements with the monetary authority. The Finance Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday it respects the autonomy of the Reserve Bank of India. That was after news broke that government officials had written ...

Bloomberg Fears of a prolonged market downturn, slowing international sales, stepped-up competition in the US and flat-out confusion about how Amazon.com Inc. makes money are all reasons behind the company’s dizzying 25 percent drop in value from its September high. The world’s largest online retailer had been an investor darling, with shares more than doubling over the past two years ...

Bloomberg HNA Group Co. has been trying for months to offload passenger planes it ordered from Airbus SE, according to people familiar with the matter, as the indebted airline-turned-glo-bal acquirer wrestles with liquidity challenges. The Chinese group asked the leasing arms of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and China Minsheng Banking Corp., amo-ng others, to take over at ...