Bloomberg China has extended visa-free access to Hainan for another 33 — mostly European and South American — countries, as President Xi Jinping seeks to boost the tropical province’s popularity among foreign tourists. New regulations expanding the travel privileges to 59 nations come into effect in May, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the State Immigration Administration. Tourists from ...

Bloomberg IBM’s one-quarter growth streak is already in doubt. Shares of the technology company fell in early trading after it reported narrower profit margins and no revenue growth, excluding help from a weak US dollar. That cast a shadow over an effort to sell more-profitable cloud-based software to revive growth after five years of revenue declines. Though heading in the ...

Bloomberg AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. may have gained an edge in the biggest merger trial in decades as the companies have exposed weaknesses in the Trump administration’s antitrust lawsuit to block their $85 billion merger, according to lawyers and economists following the battle. As the US rested its case in the fifth week of the trial, AT&T and ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is starting to comply with new privacy rules in Europe. And then, to get ahead of scrutiny everywhere else, the company said it will provide the same protections to the rest of its 2 billion users. Users in Europe this week will get notifications about some of the information they’re sharing, like their religion and political views, ...

Bloomberg UK inflation slowed to the weakest in a year in March, raising questions about how quickly the Bank of England will increase interest rates. Consumer prices rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier, down from 2.7 percent in February, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. That’s less than economists estimated and below the BOE’s most recent forecast ...

Bloomberg US Supreme Court justices signalled they are divided about whether to let states start collecting billions of dollars in sales taxes from internet retailers that don’t currently charge tax to their customers. Hearing arguments in Washington in a South Dakota case, the justices considered overturning their 1992 ruling that made much of the inte-rnet a tax-free zone by exempting ...

Threatening tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump has provoked swift vows of retaliation from Beijing, shaken financial markets, and generated great uncertainty and confusion. Long before China started to run huge trade surpluses against the US, he ranted against American trade partners. Other countries, he claimed in 1999, “can’t believe how easy it is to deal with the ...

Bank of America Corp. (BofA) CEO Brian Moynihan pledged in his recent letter to shareholders to keep the bank on the path of “growing responsibly.” The question is whether keeping Bank of America straight has narrowed its profits too much. The first quarter appeared to support that. Bank of America said that its quarterly earnings per share rose nearly 38 ...

Sterling is back into its pre-Brexit referendum range versus the dollar, quite an amazing achievement from the depths of Brexit despair in late 2016. While dollar weakness has driven all the major currencies stronger, some of the fire under sterling has been driven by the Bank of England’s recent desire to raise rates. That desire, like many things in life, ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it expects the global economy to expand 3.9 percent this year and next, a forecast that is unchanged from January estimates. That’s the good news for markets. The bad news is that there was something much more important in the IMF report this quarter: caveats about risks related to protectionism and global conflict. Given ...