Bloomberg The US will continue to withhold $255 million in military aid to Pakistan as the White House reviews the nation’s ‘level of cooperation’ in fighting terrorism, a National Security Council spokesperson said. The announcement came just hours after Trump in a tweet said the US has ‘foolishly’ given more than $33 billion in aid to the country and gotten ...

Bloomberg Israel’s parliament passed an amendment on Tuesday that would make it harder for it to cede control over parts of Jerusalem in any peace deal with the Palestinians, who condemned the move as undermining any chance to revive talks on statehood. The legislation, sponsored by the far-right Jewish Home coalition party, raises to 80 from 61 the number of ...

Bloomberg The European Union can’t pick and choose which bits of its economic relationship with Britain it maintains and which it eliminates in any future trade deal, UK Brexit Secretary David Davis said, throwing the words of EU diplomats back at them. Post-Brexit trade talks are due to start in March, with a year remaining until Britain’s scheduled exit day ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration’s national security strategy calls for a more aggressive approach toward stopping a North Korean missile strike on the US: knocking the weapons out prior to launch. But it’s unclear that the US has the technology or on-the-ground intelligence to effectively carry out a preemptive strike in that kind of crisis situation. And if it fails, the ...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 — commonly known as the Republican tax reform bill — has a number of good things in it. My Bloomberg View colleague Justin Fox has an excellent rundown. The corporate-tax rate cut was something that needed to happen for a long time, and mainly just follows the example set by other developed ...

One year ago, India’s bond market was riding a wave of unprecedented liquidity. Now it’s mired in all kinds of doubts, ending 2017 weaker than Chinese sovereign debt when the opposite outcome would have been more natural. After all, India saw a ratings upgrade by Moody’s Investors Service during the year, while China was downgraded. The message for Indian Prime ...

Shenzhen is the only downer this year among major Asian stock markets. The Shenzhen Composite Index, often referred to as China’s Nasdaq, fell about 4 percent in dollar terms, a sad result compared with the more than 35 percent gain in the Hang Seng Index. The Shanghai Stock Exchange SSE 50 A-Share Index, the so-called Beautiful 50 gauge of China’s ...

Europe’s regulators and financial institutions are under the gun: With a January 3 deadline, they’ve been scrambling to comply with new rules designed to make the region’s capital markets more investor-friendly. The goal — if not the way the policy is being implemented — is one their counterparts in the US might want to consider. Attention so far has focused ...

The number of Chinese registered as suffering from depression, anxiety, dementia, and other mental illnesses increased by 25 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to Chinese authorities. By one recent accounting, they number 173 million. Only 20 million receive professional treatment. Long-standing social stigmas and a lack of treatment options account for most of the gap. But those biases and ...

If financial market volatility was given up for dead in 2017, then get ready for a resurrection. To understand why, take a look at the incoming economic data. When the underlying dynamics of the economy change, the data tend to become more volatile before markets react. Economic volatility as expressed by the standard deviation of changes in the monthly data ...