Bloomberg American manufacturers remain competitive and lower goods exports aren’t solely to blame for a widening US trade deficit and fewer manufacturing jobs, according to analysis by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. It sees three key factors explaining the burgeoning trade gap and fall in production jobs: Unit labor costs in manufacturing have grown slowly, reflecting a surge in productivity growth ...

A few months ago, I cautioned that Americans should be patient before deciding what effect President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have had on the economy. It takes a while for companies to make investment decisions, more time for those decisions to be implemented and even more time for the resulting changes in labor demand to bid up workers’ wages. It ...

The Federal Reserve is highly unlikely to raise rates at its policy meeting next week. The view that the event will be a snoozer, with little potential to move markets significantly, is reinforced in two ways: The semi-annual report to Congress on monetary policy by Chair Jerome Powell last week that involved comprehensive written submissions and hours of Q&A; and ...

As far as cyberhacks go, those in health care are particularly irksome. The notion that some stranger, a malicious one at that, has accessed our medical data gets under most people’s skin. Even beyond financial and employment data, there’s nothing more personal than our history of diseases, diagnoses and medicines, including possibly psychological or even terminal conditions. News at the ...

In a long-awaited decision, the European Commission fined Alphabet Inc’s Google a record 4.3 billion euros ($5 billion) for unfair business practices. The commission won some praise for standing up to big tech. But theatrics aside, this decision is misguided, harmful to consumers, and almost entirely beside the point. Start with the alleged offenses. Google licenses its Android software to ...

China has suffered a series of diplomatic blows lately. Relations with the US are at a multi-decade low as a trade war escalates. This month, Malaysia suspended four Chinese-backed projects as its prime minister tries to pull away from Beijing’s orbit. From Myanmar to Sri Lanka to Vietnam, China’s overseas investm-ents are being met with a growing backlash. These are ...

Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s strategy for expanding WeChat Pay globally is pretty straightforward: Follow the (tourism) money. Grace Yin, operations director of WeChat Pay’s international business, summarised Tencent’s approach at the RISE Conference earlier this month in Hong Kong: If a place has a Chinese tourist, then this place is our target. It’s a smart strategy. Simple, elegant and actionable with ...

India needs a strategy to get the government out of banking. Non-performing loans among state-owned banks — a legacy of India’s socialist past which account for nearly 70 percent of deposits — have crossed 5 percent of GDP. The central bank has restricted lending at 11 of them and forced one, IDBI Bank Ltd., to sell itself to the government-owned ...

Bloomberg Blackstone Group LP wants to crash the direct-lending party. In the seven months since dissolving a partnership with FS Investment Corp., Blackstone’s GSO Capital Partners unit has rebuilt its business making nonbank loans to small and mid-size companies. GSO has extended some credit already and plans to amass $10 billion of equity and debt capital for the effort in ...

Bloomberg Barclays Plc is considering a return to consumer banking in India as it seeks to deploy more of the capital it holds in the South Asian unit, people familiar with the matter said. The UK bank, which decided to pull out of the business in 2011, aims to rebuild the retail banking operation in Asia’s third-largest economy through digital ...