Bloomberg Eclipsed by Brexit headlines, the most puzzling economic problem facing Britain is back in the limelight. Abysmal productivity growth has plagued the UK for a decade, sapping its underlying strength and undermining wage growth. Countless explanations and solutions have been proffered, and now the debate is raging again after a proposal that fixing it be made one of the ...

Bloomberg Canadian auto parts maker Magna International Inc. has joined a chorus of automotive companies urging the US not to impose tariffs on their products. The proposed tariffs would negatively affect both the US and Canada, cut jobs, and raise prices for consumers, Magna, among the the largest automotive suppliers in the US, said in a letter to US Commerce ...

Bloomberg Tesla Inc. reached a milestone critical to Elon Musk’s goal to bring electric cars to the masses — and earn some profit in the process — by finally exceeding a long-sought production target with the Model 3. By building more than 5,000 of the sedans in the last week of the second quarter, Tesla “just became a real car ...

In recent months, a number of big, bold proposals have been advanced to relieve economic pressure on the poor, including a federal job guarantee, a universal basic income and single-payer health care. But a lot of more modest but still important ideas are being overlooked. One of these is the idea of stable work scheduling. Over the years, many employers, ...

Imagine India’s GDP growth had collapsed to 3%; inflation was about to hit double digits; exports were tanking; and the country’s twin deficits—in the government’s budget, and in the nation’s current account—were out of control. It’s only when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tries to imagine such a dire scenario for March 2019 that its simulation exercise for bad ...

Securities, or not securities. That is the crypto question. Except in Thailand. While regulators around the world have grappled with the issue of what category digital currencies and assets fall into, Thailand has skipped the debate altogether. Instead, using an emergency decree that came into effect earlier this year, authorities wrote an entirely new law. The result is the Digital ...

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond and Bank of England chief Mark Carney are a two-man Brexit juggling act, valiantly trying to convince the outside world that they can keep the UK from crashing to earth. The duo have survived political mud-slinging by Brexiteers, a faltering economy and heavy criticism of deep cuts to public spending (Hammond) and historically ...

If Amazon’s move to disrupt health care is going to make Americans any healthier, the improvement is most likely to take place in the business of getting prescription drugs to patients more reliably. For one thing, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Failure to take prescription drugs kills about 125,000 Americans a year, according to a recent review in the ...

Being a banker in London is probably the very definition of belonging to “the 1 percent.” Yet only one in three is satisfied with his or her pay, according to one survey. Considering the stagnant productivity in the city’s finance sector, perhaps they should be more grateful. Britain as a whole has been a productivity laggard since the financial crisis, ...

Since January 1, when China stopped accepting the rich world’s recyclable plastic waste, it’s gotten a ton of criticism for worsening the already deep crisis of ocean plastic pollution. But China isn’t the only culprit here. This is a crisis made — and growing worse — throughout developing Asia. Just eight countries in the region are responsible for about 63 ...