Bloomberg Telkom SA SOC Ltd., South Africa’s largest landline operator, won’t award any new business to KPMG LLP’s local unit pending the outcome of an investigation into the firm by the country’s accountancy body. Any contracts underway with the auditor and consulting firm will be completed and their expiration dates will stand, the Pretoria-based company said in an email to ...

The “spoils society” is a phrase I coined some years ago to illustrate a basic problem of wealthy societies, including, of course, the United States. After all, our annual GDP (gross domestic product) is approaching $20 trillion. The problem is that, as societies become richer, so does the temptation for people to advance their economic interests by grabbing someone else’s ...

My thoughts tend to go to dark places these days. And so when I watched Google on Wednesday trot out one after another of its homegrown computing devices for every task and every nook of our homes, I went straight to dystopia: R.I.P. digital competition. Today most people experience computing through devices controlled by a handful of companies: principally Microsoft ...

Central bankers are increasingly concerned about the possibility of low inflation expectations. But will those worries have an impact on the Federal Reserve’s December meeting? With the bank seemingly on autopilot for the rest of 2017, odds still favor a rate hike, yet if fears of falling inflation expectations gain more traction, look for policy makers to start downgrading rate-increase ...

The National Rifle Association has finally found a device it will not unequivocally defend. The bump stock, which essentially turns a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun and helped Stephen Paddock turn Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas into the deadliest in modern US history, should be subject to “additional regulations,” the group said on Thursday. If congratulations are not ...

Forget Twitter trolls, Facebook ads and multilingual propaganda websites: The biggest Russian threat to Western democracies comes from the massive amounts of cash Russians have exported and parked in the West. That money’s corrupting potential is all but limitless, but both the increasingly isolationist Russia and the increasingly anti-Russian West do little to stem the flow. In a recent paper, ...

India’s company boards are due for another shakeup, and this time around investors should see some real change. The reason to place a higher burden of expectation on the Uday Kotak committee, which submitted its report to the stock-market regulator, is that it’s at least attempting to break away from a 20-year tradition of trying to fashion a modern corporate ...

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Donald Trump told Geraldo Rivera. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be—you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.” Bond markets didn’t appreciate the ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Boerse AG’s clearinghouse plans to start a revenue-sharing plan with its biggest members in a bid to lure business from London after Brexit. The Eurex Clearing partnership program will reward its 10 most active participants with a share of revenue, and give board seats at the clearinghouse to the five largest. Deutsche Boerse has already received interest from ...

Bloomberg Ignazio Visco might be just days away from pulling off the second coup of his unexpected tenure at the helm of Italy’s central bank — by staying on. The Bank of Italy governor, selected out of the blue by then-premier Silvio Berlusconi in 2011 after weeks of speculation that hadn’t mentioned him, may be about to benefit from a ...