Bloomberg It’s turning into a good week for Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., South Africa’s state-owned electricity company. The cash-strapped utility’s borrowing costs fell as it tapped international debt markets for the first time in more than three years, barely a week after it secured a $2.5 billion loan from China Development Bank. It also moved closer to a wage deal ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia, which recently pledged oil-supply increases to tame rallying crude prices, cut production last month, according to OPEC delegates familiar with the matter. The biggest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pumped 10.3 million barrels a day in July, according to the delegates, who asked not to be identified because the data is private. The kingdom ...

Bloomberg The trade war between the world’s two biggest economies is taking on a life of its own. When President Donald Trump first threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese goods in March to punish Beijing for stealing American intellectual property, trade experts warned the two nations risked slipping into a downward spiral of tit-for-tat trade actions. The global economy now ...

Bloomberg Kraft Heinz Co. has narrowed the list of bidders for a portfolio of Indian businesses it’s selling that includes the children’s milk drink Complan, people with knowledge of the matter said. Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate, and Dabur India Ltd., the $11.3 billion consumer-goods company, are among suitors selected for the second round of bidding, according to the people. ...

Bloomberg A group of Republican and Democratic senators slammed Alphabet Inc.’s Google over reports it is developing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market. China critic Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, was joined by five other lawmakers on a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding answers about the proposed “Dragonfly” search engine. “If true, ...

Bloomberg Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV filed a US trade complaint seeking to prevent Indian automaker Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. from importing an off-road vehicle that looks similar to its iconic Jeep. The Fiat Chrysler group filed the complaint on August 1 at the US International Trade Commission, claiming that the Mahindra Roxor infringes key characteristics of Jeep’s signature trade dress ...

With only eight months left until Brexit, the UK government has become desperate for a transition deal. For all the talk of stockpiling food and medicines, no self-respecting politician would take the country through the economic calamity of a “cliff-edge” Brexit. The prime minister is doing the rounds to promote her “Chequers” blueprint, which includes a free trade area for ...

The earnings season three months ago raised one key question for corporate America: Did companies have the pricing power to respond to rising freight and commodity costs by raising their own prices? This quarter’s earnings season is providing an answer: Yes. So companies are going to raise prices. That aims to protect their profit margins. At whose expense? The whole ...

Kraft Heinz Co. represents all that is wrong with aspects of corporate America. So why does Warren Buffett like the stock? The US markets and economy may be holding up, but there’s a corner of the business world with an unsettling combination of factors: few growth opportunities, resistance to new customer trends, ruthless cost-cutting to make up for revenue shortfalls, ...

The Treasury Department is apparently looking into using its regulatory power to change the way taxes on capital gains are assessed. The idea is to confine the taxes to real, inflation-adjusted gains, not nominal gains, as now. There’s a particle of sense in this notion, but it’s buried miles deep in bad faith and bad economics. The change would amount ...