Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase say they’re putting their heads together to make health care better and less expensive for their employees. Just possibly, it’s a partnership that could disrupt the US health-care system — in a good way. The market value of insurance companies and pharmacy-benefit managers dropped on the announcement, a sign that investors think the alliance ...

It’s almost as though there’s too much good news in Japan. So much that some investors are starting to expect the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to lay groundwork for easing off its stimulus — and the central bank is falling over itself to convince them that policy is not going to change anytime soon. My, how things have changed! Instead ...

I hate to say I told you so, but … well, I told you so. Bitcoin, while still a popular financial asset, is looking less and less like a currency. Online payments company Stripe is ending Bitcoin support. It cites several reasons for doing so: “[Bitcoin] transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase ...

There’s an evolving mystery about Facebook: How are we supposed to measure its popularity now? On January 31, Facebook initially spooked investors by disclosing the slowest growth rate of daily users in its history and a 5 percent decline in the amount of time people spent on the social network in the final quarter of 2017. The company’s stock price ...

President Donald Trump talked a lot about coal mining during his campaign, and he has kept talking about it since. “We have ended the war on clean coal,” he declared in his State of the Union address just this week. I’d take issue with the phrase “clean coal” (more on that later), but it is definitely true that the Trump ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure urged European governments to push ahead with plans to strengthen monetary union to avoid stretching his institution’s mandate in the next crisis. “Without further reforms, the next crisis may well force the ECB to test the limits of its mandate,” he said in a speech near Ljubljana, Slovenia. “To assume that ...

Bloomberg UBS AG brought forward its forecast for the next UK interest-rate increase, though it also sounded a warning bell about such a move. Bank of England policy makers will raise their benchmark by 25 points at their May meeting, strategist John Wraith wrote in a report dated January 31. In forecasts published after the BOE’s November rate hike, UBS ...

Bloomberg Czech policy makers raised borrowing costs for the third time in six months to cool one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies and unveiled a hotly anticipated outlook predicting a surge in the currency. The Czech National Bank’s board voted unanimously to increase the benchmark interest rate a quarter point to 0.75 percent, Governor Jiri Rusnok said. The fresh forecasts, which ...

Bloomberg Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and State Street Corp. stand to benefit most as US regulators rush to ease a key leverage rule, giving the custody-banking giants room to once again accept deposits they’ve shunned in recent years. The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency may unveil a proposal to ease the leverage ...

Bloomberg Macquarie Group Ltd. is teaming up with a New York-based venture firm to spot the next big thing in energy and infrastructure innovation. The Australian bank will provide specialist knowledge and possibly financial backing for the project with R/GA Ventures, according to a statement. Macquarie’s New York-based program will help develop so-called infratech companies, which typically feature technology and ...