The US and China continue to head toward a possible trade war, as negotiations to bridge the gap between the two countries last week ended inconclusively. Donald Trump’s administration has demanded far-reaching Chinese concessions to reduce the bilateral trade deficit, address Beijing’s mercantilist trade practices, and open up key sectors of the Chinese economy to greater foreign competition. The White ...

Britain’s big four banks, branded dinosaurs by the many upstarts that have sprung up since the crisis, were supposed to be extinct by now. Yet with Brexit around the corner, their bulky balance sheets and dominant market share are proving hard to kill. Judging by the latest proposed pairing of two challengers — CYBG Plc and Richard Branson’s Virgin Money ...

UK regulators have given Barclays CEO Jes Staley what looks like a slap on the wrist after his botched attempt to unmask a whistle-blower. He will be fined, but will get to keep his job — lucky for the board, given their lack of appetite for a power vacuum at the top of one of the country’s biggest banks. Ousting ...

It was big news when Walmart Inc. agreed to buy most of Flipkart, India’s leading e-commerce company. Another online shopping king made a couple of moves that showed the importance of trying and buying in the real world. First, Amazon.com Inc. said last week that it had started to open “experience centers” in model homes to give people a taste ...

Walmart Inc. might want to portray its $16 billion purchase of India’s largest e-commerce firm, Flipkart Group, as a brilliant strategic move, long-planned in secret, that would allow the US retail giant to manage the transition away from big-box stores globally. Yet, the truth is that the deal represents a second-best outcome — if that — for Walmart as well ...

Many companies would shy from being lumped alongside indebted Chinese investment groups such as Fosun International Ltd. and HNA Group Co. It’s a comparison that Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. should welcome. Masayoshi Son’s company is trying to shed its image as a telecom operator. SoftBank’s US carrier Sprint Corp. has agreed to merge with competitor T-Mobile US Inc., leaving the ...

Millions of people received an email from Twitter last week advising them to change their password. Apparently a bug allowed some employees inside the company to see users’ passwords in plain text, creating the possibility that private information could be compromised. I received this email, read it and promptly deleted it. I forgot all about it until the subject came ...

Bloomberg Mark Carney’s window to raise interest rates before Brexit is closing. As Britain draws nearer to its divorce from the European Union at the end of March with little certainty as to the economic repercussions, Bank of England policy makers with a benchmark interest rate of just 0.5 percent could be left with limited room to cut should they ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. must pay $97 million to home mortgage consultants and private mortgage bankers in California who didn’t get the breaks they were entitled to under the state’s stringent labor laws. A federal judge in Los Angeles agreed with the bankers and consultants that the money they were entitled to should be based not just on their ...

Bloomberg New Zealand’s central bank held interest rates at a record low and left the door open to a cut as inflation remains subdued. Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr kept the official cash rate at 1.75 percent and said it would remain there “for some time to come.” The RBNZ pushed out its forecast for the first OCR increase to ...