Bloomberg Singapore’s tax increase on home purchases exceeding S$1 million ($758,960) is aimed at making duties more equitable rather than imposing an additional property curb, said S. Iswaran, minister of trade and industry. Stamp duty on the portion of a property’s price above S$1 million will be raised starting from Tuesday to 4 percent from 3 percent, the government said ...

Bloomberg Indonesia is foregoing billions of dollars on offer from American companies eager to invest in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, US Ambassador to Indonesia Joseph Donovan said. As the US tries to arrest a deteriorating trade balance with Indonesia, which in 2017 found itself in President Donald Trump’s cross-hairs, Donovan has also rejected complaints of increasing American protectionism. Indonesia had ...

Bloomberg The UK has warned that its promise to pay the Brexit bill depends on getting good trade terms from the European Union, as Theresa May’s team draws up plans to hold back money if the bloc backslides on a deal. Senior British officials have privately discussed the idea of halting payments to Brussels as a fall-back option that could ...

Bloomberg UK manufacturers scaled back their expectations of output prices in February as the pound gained. Expected prices, production and export orders are still well above long-term averages, though have slipped from the highs seen at the end of 2017, the Confederation of British Industry reported on Tuesday. The measure of average prices seen in the next three months fell ...

Bloomberg The UK has sold Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean to Brazil for about 84 million pounds ($117 million) as new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth prepares to take over as leader of the fleet. HMS Ocean will be modified by BAE Systems Plc and Babcock International Group Plc, with the work funded by Brazil, before the 21,500 metric-ton ship ...

Bloomberg After a cyberattack and a botched product launch spoiled Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc’s 2017, a pricing squeeze threatens to make this year almost as tough. The Slough, England-based maker of Nurofen painkillers said comparable sales will rise by only 2 percent to 3 percent in 2018, and profitability will be curtailed by deflationary conditions in the consumer-goods business. That ...

Bloomberg A Trump administration plan to replace food-stamp spending with boxes of “100 percent American grown food’’ landed on Congress’s doorstep with a thud. But the public attention heaped on the Agriculture Department’s plan to deliver “Harvest Boxes” to poor families also obscured the administration’s other efforts to cut the number of people eligible for the nation’s biggest food-aid programme. ...

Wedged between Brazil and Venezuela, Guyana could easily go unnoticed. It has fewer than 750,000 people and a per capita income of $4,300, half the regional average, qualifying it as the hemisphere’s third-poorest nation. At the moment, Guyana also might be its luckiest. Having struck big oil offshore starting in 2015, industry experts reckon total reserves at around 2 billion ...

Singaporeans have dodged the bullet of higher consumption taxes, at least for the next three years. They should thank their new BFF — the bond market. Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat left the goods and services tax, last raised to 7 percent in 2007, unchanged on Monday. Most commentators, including yours truly, had expected an increase after Prime Minister Lee ...

Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Standard Life Aberdeen Plc have fallen out after talks to merge their insurance businesses fell apart. But the two have left the door open to overcoming their differences and getting the deal back on track. News of the failed talks fills in some of the background to Lloyds’s announcement last week that it plans to ...