Bloomberg Ireland’s government pledged to stand by its embattled deputy leader, raising the stakes in a stand-off which could lead to a surprise general election. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar won’t “abandon” his deputy, Frances Fitzgerald, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said in a RTE radio interview after opposition political forces demanded she resign over her handling of a whistle blower ...

In the run-up to the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, and immediately after it, the ‘remain’ campaign was much derided for fear-mongering. People are sick and tired of experts warning about doomsday scenarios, said Conservative politician and lead-Brexiter Michael Gove. Those warning that Brexit would cost the economy were dubbed “remoaners”; Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond ...

India’s fledgling bankruptcy regime is turning both karmic and American. Eat, pray, love; applaud the shift. The government tweaked the 2016 insolvency law on Wednesday to disallow managements that have been “willful defaulters” from bidding for their own assets. That weird term has been defined by the central bank as instances where borrower firms didn’t repay while having the capacity ...

The Justice Department’s new head of antitrust enforcement, Makan Delrahim, is getting plenty of grief for his surprise decision to challenge merger of AT&T and Time Warner. He’s been accused of stretching law “beyond the breaking point,” and of helping President Donald Trump act on his long-running grudge against Time Warner’s flagship news network, CNN. Actually, Justice is to be ...

The idea that prices in financial markets reflect all available information — also known as the efficient markets hypothesis — has many variations: Some adherents think the process is immediate and precise, while others think it’s much messier, with prices often missing true value by a significant margin. New research suggests that the latter version fits the data better — ...

The great Chinese environmental cleanup, now in full swing, is shifting the corporate landscape in unexpected ways and even stoking inflationary pressure that may soon be felt in supply chains worldwide. As President Xi Jinping’s government intensifies the fight against the country’s world-class pollution problem, companies are scrambling to adapt to tighter regulation while investing in cleaner energy. In industries ...

China’s largest blue chips are flying high.There’s been a seismic shift in the notoriously speculative $8.7 trillion stock market. Large-cap blue-chip companies are the new darlings, a reversal from the smaller growth stocks previously in favor. The Beautiful 50, a local term for the 50 most influential companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, returned 33 percent this year. The Shenzhen ...

We’ve known for a long time that Google makes content decisions, but recent moves in the direction of censorship are going too far. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a regulatory backlash given Google’s victims: websites that no mainstream politician will defend. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told a conference on Monday the company was working ...

Bloomberg The data breach at Uber Technologies holds a lesson for software developers who use third-party services to store and share code: be careful what you share. Services like San Francisco-based Github Inc., GitLab and SourceForge are used by developers to collaborate on projects, track bugs in code and distribute early versions of applications. They’re a target for cyberthieves. Uber ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is expanding its workforce in one of the few areas in banking where demand for talent is growing. “We’re currently recruiting more people for artificial intelligence [AI],” Veronica Lange, head of innovation at Switzerland’s biggest bank, said in an interview in Moscow. “These are data scientists, architects, business analysts.” AI refers to technology capable of performing ...