When British voters decided in June 2016 to exit the European Union, investors who had anticipated the opposite result stampeded out of sterling and the currency plummeted a record 8.05 percent to a 31-year low. Almost 20 months later, the pound has mostly recovered, providing some satisfaction to commentators who’d predicted that Brexit would prove more distressing to the EU. ...

Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market’s rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines—and blame them, too. Last year, Marko Kolanovic, global head of quantitative and derivative research at JPMorgan, estimated that ...

Biotech is bursting back to life in the US, and the enthusiasm is being felt across the Pacific. The crown jewel of the rally in Asia is South Korea’s Celltrion Inc., whose shares have soared 43 percent in the first month of 2018. While the surge has been driven partly by the stock’s impending upgrade from the small-and-mid-cap Kosdaq index ...

Bloomberg Europe is suddenly the hot market for hedge-fund investment. After years of being overlooked, the continent is attracting capital from investors who want to take advantage of a recovering economy as the last effects of the euro-zone debt crisis disappear. Buyers are also piling in to diversify portfolios swelled by the stock-market boom — which after this week’s correction ...

Bloomberg A selloff in the market for speculative-grade corporate bonds accelerated amid turmoil in the stock market, handing investors their worst weekly loss since the oil slump two years ago. The bonds lost 1.5 percent on the week, the worst performance since February 2016, Bloomberg Barclays index data show. The average spread on high-yield bonds — or the premium investors ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Italy expects the nation’s economy to expand in 2018 at the same pace as last year since monetary policy “is working” and the ongoing reduction of economic slack has strengthened confidence, Governor Ignazio Visco said. The central bank expects Italy’s gross domestic product will expand about 1.5 percent this year and should remain above 1 percent ...

Bloomberg Mexico’s central bank raised its key interest rate as expected for a second straight meeting and signalled it will prioritise the peso’s inflation implications rather than moves by the Federal Reserve for its future decisions. Banco de Mexico’s board voted unanimously to lift borrowing costs a quarter point to 7.5 percent, a move forecast by 23 of 26 economists ...

DUBAI / Reuters Sharp swings in global financial markets in the past few days are not worrying since economic growth is strong but reforms are still needed to avert future crises, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund said on Sunday. Christine Lagarde, speaking at a conference on global business and social trends in Dubai, said economies were also ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank has woken up to the risks digital currencies can pose to policy makers’ bread-and-butter business: the economy. “If you increasingly have bridges between the virtual world and the real world and then there is a collapse in this virtual world, it could drain liquidity from the real world,” Executive Board member Yves Mersch said in ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Russia is refocussing its sights on trying to support economic growth after inflation settled at the lowest level in the country’s modern history and geopolitical risks receded. While central banks tend to eschew efforts to look beyond their mandate, policy makers in Moscow appear willing to take on the challenge of economic growth head on. The ...