­­­­­­­­­­­Bloomberg Swiss engineering company ABB Ltd. agreed to buy General Electric Co.’s industrial solutions business for $2.6 billion to strengthen its foothold in the US, the world’s biggest market for electrification products like circuit breakers and switchgears. ABB will incur costs of $400 million over five years to integrate GE’s industrial solutions unit, Chief Executive Officer Ulrich Spiesshofer told journalists ...

Bloomberg Silicon Valley spent more than a decade finding ways to give company founders more control. When Facebook Inc. tried to follow suit, shareholders pushed back. Google started it with a 2004 initial public offering that gave co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin voting rights well beyond their economic stakes in the search giant. Groupon Inc., Zynga Inc. and Facebook ...

Bloomberg As new Nestle SA Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider prepares to lay out his strategic vision for the Swiss food giant, his plans will be overshadowed by a changing of the guard at another European consumer-goods giant—L’Oreal SA of France. Nestle owns 23 percent of the French cosmetics maker, and the death of heiress Liliane Bettencourt raises questions about ...

Bloomberg Tesla Inc. has generated nearly $1 billion in revenue the last five years from an unlikely source: Rival automakers. Needless to say, the other companies aren’t happy. California requires that automakers sell electric and other non-polluting vehicles in proportion to their market share. If the manufacturers don’t sell enough of them, they have to purchase credits from competitors to ...

Bloomberg Storm watches have been issued for North Carolina as the US is threatened by a hurricane for the fourth time in a month. Tropical storm watches, meaning winds of at least 63 kilometres per hour could reach the coast of North Carolina as early as Tuesday, have been posted from Surf City to the Virginia border, the US National ...

It was an epoch-defining decision to place in Westminster Abbey, among statues of monarchs, priests and poets, a large one of James Watt, inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine. The statue’s inscription says Watt ranks among the world’s benefactors because he “increased the power of man.” The economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey believes this honor, conferred in 1834, signified society’s ...

The Indian stock market seems unstoppable. Its major indices have risen over 20 percent this year, making it one of Asia’s best performers. Indian investors have piled into more than $7.2 billion worth of stock in 2017 and foreigners have bought almost $7 billion. Yet corporate earnings have hardly recovered enough to justify such exuberance. The quarter between April and ...

Under the lax ethical standards President Donald Trump brought to the White House, rampant conflicts of interest are treated with casual indifference. This disregard has sent a message to his entire administration that blurring lines—between public and private, right and wrong—will be not just tolerated but defended. At least one cabinet member appears to have taken the message to heart. ...

No one knows how North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will respond to growing pressure on his regime, other than by scouring the thesaurus. But the US and China seem to be stumbling toward a more effective strategy for confronting him. More boldness from the latter, and restraint from the former, will be necessary to see it through. New US ...

In times of market uncertainty, some investors will flock to “safeguarded” currencies such as the Swiss franc or Japanese yen. Others may choose diversifiers like gold, farmland or other hard assets. And then there are those who flock to alternative investments like bitcoin. Yet one investment that has historically been considered a safe bet, low-risk option for investors when frothy ...