This week’s annual Mobile World Congress comes at a turning point for the industry: 2017 was the first year in four that mobile phone sales fell. The action on the convention hall floor, combined with some nearly buried findings in one operator’s annual results, may signal the next big thing in mobile growth. The smartphone age is certainly not over, ...

If Donald Trump was aiming at China with his lofty proposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, he’s a terrible marksman. Not only will Chinese leaders likely brush off the measures. They have good reason to embrace them. China is unquestionably the big, bad wolf of the global steel industry. With roughly ten times the steelmaking capacity of the US, ...

Xi Jinping can hold off on retirement planning for a few more years, now that China’s Communist Party has announced a proposal to eliminate a 10-year, two-term limit for China’s presidency. That sets up the powerful 64-year-old Xi to remain in office well into his golden years. He shouldn’t be the only one. Set aside for a moment the question ...

The wild gyrations in capital markets in early February had a profound impact on investor sentiment. The spike in implied volatility, as measured by the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), roiled long-pacific markets, leading investors to question even now, almost a month later, whether a sustained selloff might be looming. According to signals from the options market, the answer is a ...

Facebook’s self-regulatory contortions in the wake of fake news and trolling scandals have gone on, with little visible effect, for months. Now Twitter founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has announced his company is going to try a different tack — but Dorsey’s approach is arguably even more far-fetched than his Facebook peer Mark Zuckerberg’s: It’s an attempt to ...

Bloomberg Mark Carney is calling for greater regulation to bring the era of cryptocurrency “anarchy” to an end. “The time has come to hold the crypto-asset ecosystem to the same standards as the rest of the financial system,” the Bank of England governor said in a speech at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London. Carney, who is also head of the ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s planned $16 billion syndicated loan, one of the largest ever in emerging markets, will cut the kingdom’s cost of funding by paying banks much less than on previous borrowings. The ministry of finance said on Twitter that it would offer banks a margin of 75 basis points over the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) for ...

Bloomberg Who’s afraid of Jerome Powell? Not emerging markets. Stocks, bonds and currencies in developing nations did tumble with global markets after the US Federal Reserve chairman’s comments this week spurred bets for four interest-rate increases in 2018. Conventional wisdom holds that the quick increase in borrowing costs will diminish risk appetite and end a two-year rally in emerging-market assets. ...

Bloomberg If you ask stock strategists, European banks are no longer a unanimous buy. Deutsche Bank AG lowered its recommendation on lenders to underweight, citing weaker economic momentum and falling German bond yields. The downgrade comes two weeks after a strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc said the bank has been cutting its position on European financials, predicting US 10-year Treasury ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Baroda’s South African unit has been in possession of the “proceeds of crime” linked to a dairy farm project that involved the politically connected Gupta family, said Thato Ntimutse, a lawyer for the National Prosecuting Authority’s Asset Forfeiture Unit. While India’s Bank of Baroda has tried to stop the state from freezing 30 million rand ($2.5 ...