Bloomberg US consumer spending rose in April by the most in five months and inflation held at the Federal Reserve’s target, adding to signs of solid economic growth that support the central bank’s plan for gradual interest-rate hikes. Purchases, which account for about 70 percent of the economy, increased 0.6 percent from the prior month, topping forecasts, after a 0.5 ...

Bloomberg Three days after being sworn in, Italy’s new populist government is preparing for one final hurdle before it sets about trying to overhaul European Union rules and the established order: a confidence vote in both houses of parliament. Parliamentary approval will be sought this week for the 18-member cabinet of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a 53-year-old law professor with ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be headed towards a Supreme Court battle that could test once and for all how much a president is above the law. Trump’s legal team and Mueller’s prosecutors have been jockeying over a presidential subpoena after months of negotiations have yet to bring them to an agreement over terms of an ...

Bloomberg A populist former prime minister won Slovenia’s elections, yet rivals who united against his anti-refugee rhetoric vowed to block him from government. Janez Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, whose campaign echoed the one that lifted nationalists to power in neighboring Italy, won a quarter of the vote, the State Election Commission said. In second place was the List of Marjan ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is preparing to publish its plan to keep the UK under European Union customs rules for longer as it seeks to break the Brexit deadlock, people familiar with the matter said. British negotiators expect to send the EU a document this week setting out how May imagines a time-limited extension to existing customs arrangements ...

Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron’s chief of staff Alexis Kohler is under investigation for his dealings with MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. when he was working for the previous government before being head-hunted to became the Geneva-based firm’s chief financial officer in 2016. France’s financial prosecutor, known as the Parquet National Financier, said it opened the probe following news reports alleging ...

If anything will revive US manufacturing, it’s certainly not an ever-changing package of hastily proposed and canceled tariffs. But as President Donald Trump pursues that non-strategy, it’s worth asking the longer-term questions of whether US manufacturing even needs to be revived at all, and if so, what can accomplish the task. There’s little doubt that the US manufacturing sector has ...

Italy’s new government is one of the most extraordinary democratic experiments tried in western Europe since the Second World War. The Five Star Movement and the League have put together a largely inexperienced ministerial team, which is promising a set of policies that seem impossible to deliver. They face formidable constraints, from Italy’s fragile public finances to EU rules that ...

It will take an Ant to move this Hong Kong stock mountain. Until recently, Hong Kong was an IPO desert. Issuance had been falling for four consecutive years as investors grew weary of deal after deal from state-owned Chinese firms. Then came ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed China Literature Ltd., which both ignited interest with their ...

Like ‘gemutlich’ (a German adjective describing fireside coziness), the Japanese word ‘omotenashi’ is hard to define but easy to picture. It’s a cashier greeting you nicely rather than chatting with colleagues and tossing your purchase across the counter — an all-encompassing focus on service and caring professionalism. Long hailed as the epitome of Japanese quality, the concept is for the ...