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House Russia probe dissolves into fight over public transcripts

Bloomberg Now that Republicans have terminated the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, the biggest outstanding question is whether the public will ever see transcripts from dozens of its closed-door witnesses. Republicans on the Intelligence panel are reversing their earlier plans to release those transcripts, while Democrats say they plan to attach the documents to their final report. With Republicans and ...

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How powerful is the Fed?

It is March 2009. The American economy is rapidly collapsing. The previous month, payroll jobs had dropped by a staggering 650,000. The grim outlook stokes gallows humour. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke receives a call from a top Fed official. “Do you want some good news?” the official asks. “Please,” Bernanke responds. “Call somebody else.” In this desperate climate, the ...

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Artificial Libor threatens Hong Kong

How much have benchmark US interest rates risen lately? You may think the correct answer is 25 basis points, or 0.25 percentage point. That’s the amount by which the US Federal Reserve raised its target for overnight interbank rates in December, the only official increase in the past nine months. Unofficially, though, borrowing costs have gone up by another 35 ...

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Volkswagen is dreaming if it thinks diesel is coming back

With the threat of city driving bans looming across Europe, people who want to know whether it still makes sense to buy a diesel vehicle shouldn’t count on any help from the autos industry’s biggest beast. That’s the only conclusion to draw from comments by Volkswagen AG’s boss on Monday that diesel cars would soon enjoy a “renaissance” as people ...

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Brexit may stunt Europe’s low-fee ETF revolution

The exchange-traded fund juggernaut that’s transformed the US investing landscape is just starting to accelerate into Europe. But there’s a risk that misguided efforts by European Union regulators to deal with the aftershocks of Brexit will stunt the market’s potential. After growing by more than 40 percent last year, Europe’s ETF industry added another 7 percent in January alone. It ...

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Manufacturing sector just keeps adding more jobs

The manufacturing mini-renaissance continues. Over the past year, according to today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sector has added 222,000 jobs, resuming a recovery that had paused in 2015 and 2016 amid strength in the dollar and weakness in the US oil and gas industry. As is somewhat apparent from the previous chart and is clear ...

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Big technology firms are behaving like a big bank

Picture a bank that lends $1 billion to small businesses in 12 months, holds $150 billion in corporate bonds, runs the world’s largest money-market fund, offers mobile payments and credit cards, and gives customers cash balances that can be topped up across thousands of homely bricks-and-mortar outlets. Except it’s not really a bank at all, but a technology firm. Google ...

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China central bank quietly gets a little autonomy

China looks set to get a new central bank governor this month. Incumbent Zhou Xiaochuan has seen it all during his 15 years in office: China’s surge to become the second-largest economy, the global financial crisis, ending the yuan’s fixed peg to the dollar and winning the currency inclusion in the IMF’s reserve basket. For all those changes, the People’s ...

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Draghi promises to avoid surprises in stimulus plan

Bloomberg Mario Draghi said the European Central Bank will avoid surprising investors with sudden changes to its stimulus plans, stressing that inflation is still too low and US trade policies and a stronger euro are concerns. “Adjustments to our policy will remain predictable, and they will proceed at a measured pace,” the institution’s president said in his opening speech at ...

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