Bloomberg Florence weakened to a tropical storm, trudging through the Carolinas at 5 miles per hour as it unloaded pelting rain and floods that killed at least five people. Its implacable advance threatens as much as $20 billion in damage, a toll that likely will unfold through the weekend. “Florence is still grinding its way across North Carolina,” Governor Roy ...

Bloomberg Super Typhoon Mangkhut battered the Philippines with gales and torrential rains, leaving at least three people dead and thousands homeless, triggering landslides and damaging an airport before heading toward China. The most powerful storm of the year ripped into Cagayan province in the northern Philippines with winds of up to 269 kilometres (167 miles) per hour. By US standards ...

Bloomberg Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team scored a significant victory as President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman pleaded guilty to conspiring against the US and agreed to cooperate in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The former campaign aide, Paul Manafort, admitted to a decade of crimes related to his work as a consultant for pro-Russia politicians ...

Bloomberg After Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was castigated in the European Parliament this week over what he calls his “illiberal democracy,” the very public rebuke was hailed as a breakthrough for Europe. For opponents of the continent’s embrace of populism, finally there was a united show of strength against a leader who has railed against the European Union’s core, ...

Bloomberg Leftist presidential candidate Fernando Haddad jumped in the first Datafolha opinion poll published since he officially replaced ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as the Workers’ Party candidate on Tuesday. In the poll published on Friday evening Haddad rose to 13 percent of vote intentions, up from 9 percent in the last poll conducted on September 10. Far-right ex-Army ...

President Donald Trump claimed to have a “magic wand” that allowed him to push the economy’s growth rate above an annual rate of 4 percent in 2018’s second quarter. This is one of the president’s more colorful public statements taking credit for the economy’s performance. Such statements are as common as they are overstated. Trump isn’t alone in exaggerating the ...

India is marking the 10th anniversary of the 2008 global financial crisis with its own mini-Lehman moment. True to script, ratings companies have belatedly realised that the IL&FS Group — Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. and its associates — is woefully short of liquidity, with about $500 million in repayments coming due in the second half of its fiscal ...

It’s rare to see a deal suffering a price cut after it’s been signed – even rarer when there’s a big equity fundraising on the side. Last week, private equity firm Advent International Plc agreed a maximum 17 percent snip to the price of Mondo Minerals BV, the Dutch talc producer it agreed to sell to British chemicals group Elementis ...

Could China’s oil and gas industry be on the brink of a revolution? That’s one interpretation of the government’s shakeup of regulations on petroleum production this month. The introduction of drill-it-or-lose-it rules and a possible extension of subsidies for unconventional gas output could end up dismembering sprawling industry leader PetroChina Co. and creating a new sector of independent upstream producers ...

The big state-owned Chinese enterprise is back. But this time, it isn’t looking sturdy enough to prop up the economy. As growth stumbles, Beijing is falling back on a tried and trusted solution: using large, government-backed companies to spur activity. That’s squeezing out private and small firms. The economy certainly merits concern. Trade frictions and Beijing’s crackdown on the underbelly ...