The election of President Emmanuel Macron in France last spring increased the odds of a unified European economic policy. He has expressed interest in moving to pan-European fiscal policy measures, eventually leading to pooling debt across countries under a common finance minister. The events of recent weeks have nudged the region in this direction. Developments in Italy and Spain — ...

What goes up, must come down. What goes up fast must come down even faster. Except Hong Kong property, perhaps. The breakneck growth of China’s private-sector conglomerates has gone into reverse as authorities recoil at the buildup of debt their overseas shopping sprees have caused. The degree of pain inflicted by that great unwinding depends on the assets being sold. ...

Pharma’s pricing power just isn’t what it used to be, and it’s probably not going to recover any time soon. Pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Express Scripts Holding Co. last week reported a record-low 1.5 percent increase in drug spending by commercial health insurance plans in 2017. It also said per-beneficiary drug spending fell for many commercial plans and gave a ...

Ignore the flim-flam, and President Donald Trump is offering some good ideas with his infrastructure proposal. The question is whether it’s too little, too late. Broadly, the plan envisions spending $200 billion to stimulate investment by states and businesses, with a goal of restoring roads, bridges and so on. It also aims to simplify regulation. With customary modesty, the White ...

Remember “war”? That thing where countries would gather up a bunch of people, give them weapons, and have them slaughter each other and pillage the countryside? For most of the past 3,000 years, war was a more-or-less constant feature of human life. Psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, chronicles the ...

Can recycling save the world from a looming shortage of cobalt? The idea has sound precedent. Lead — an essential ingredient in traditional car batteries, just as cobalt will be for the coming generation of lithium-ion cells — is probably the most extensively recycled industrial raw material on earth. With cobalt demand from cars, electric buses and utility-scale batteries set ...

From the cab of Rodney Terry’s state-of-the-art John Deere cotton stripper, harvesting cotton seems like the easiest job in the world. We chug along at 4 or 5 miles an hour, watching the giant machine’s bright yellow fingers gobble up eight rows of bolls at a time. White rows magically turn brown as we pass over them. Then comes the ...

Bloomberg One of India’s biggest banks has accused jeweller Nirav Modi — who’s dressed stars including Kate Winslet and Priyanka Chopra — of involvement in a multi-billion dollar fraud that could extend to other lenders, said people familiar with the matter. Punjab National Bank filed a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation, the federal investigation agency, alleging that Modi ...

Bloomberg Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and United Overseas Bank Ltd. reported higher fourth-quarter profit even as they added bad-loan provisions in an effort to put the pain of soured credit to energy-services companies behind them. OCBC’s specific net allowances for loans quadrupled year-on-year to S$1.06 billion ($802 million) in the three months ended December, the bank said on Wednesday. Risks from ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse AG’s bonus pool increased at a slower pace in 2017 than a year before, showing that the bank remains cautious about spending as its restructuring continues. Total bonuses for 2017 will rise 3 percent, Adam Gishen, head of investor relations, said in a phone interview with Bloomberg. That’s lower than the 6 percent gain seen the year ...