The IS’s headquarters in Tabqa at the western gateway to Raqqah has been crushed like a sand castle by American bombs. At a dam complex on the Euphrates River where IS until May was torturing prisoners, all that’s left of the extremists are militant slogans scrawled on the wall and a pile of trash. It’s far too soon to say ...

If you bought $100 worth of the BSE 500 Index instead of MSCI India at the beginning of the year, you would have made about $5.50 extra. If you’re after exposure to the next China, then why not pocket a bit of extra cash? The MSCI lags because it still favours India’s information services companies and snubs the financial firms ...

Sometimes, the wrong person for the job has the perfect background. HSBC Holdings Plc might confront that issue if its approach to Peter Hancock results in the former American International Group Inc. boss being picked to replace Stuart Gulliver as chief executive. A duo of Mark Tucker, the incoming chairman, and Hancock as CEO would give HSBC its first leaders ...

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised a dramatic departure from the recent past. France’s youngest leader since Napoleon has brought in on his coat-tails a new generation of fresh-faced young leaders, many of whom have never held political office before. And in his debut speech to both houses of France’s parliament, Macron reiterated his call for a new order — ...

On the second floor of a 24,000-square-foot, used-goods superstore in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Koji Onazawa pauses beside some old Japanese surfboards. He’s spent nearly two decades at Bookoff Corp. — a corporate legend in Japan that’s barely known outside it, with 832 secondhand shops across the country. Now he’s running Jalan Jalan Japan, the company’s first true foray ...

Could China, the world’s largest automobile market, help address the threat of global warming if it went completely electric? The answer isn’t as obvious as it seems. China has been making great strides toward electrification. Electric vehicle sales are booming: Consumers bought more than 300,000 last year, and more than 5 million are expected to be on the road by ...

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, major central banks adopted extraordinary measures to stabilize the global system and revive growth. These measures included the maintenance of near-zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve for seven years, and a quintupling of its balance sheet over that period through bond purchases. This process, known as quantitative easing, was also a key ...

DUBAI / Reuters Qatar’s stock index edged up on Wednesday as foreign ministers of four Arab states prepared to meet to consider sanctions against Doha. A deadline for Qatar to comply with a list of demands made by the states expired overnight. Doha has submitted replies to mediator Kuwait that have not been disclosed. Doha has shown no sign of ...

Bloomberg It’s not just emerging-market stocks that have shed their umbi- lical link to oil and commodities. Bonds and currencies are also breaking free. Stocks in the developing world posted the best start to a year since 2009 even as oil capped its worst first half in 19 years. That’s partly because the weight of energy companies in the benchmark ...

Bloomberg Asian equities gained even as concerns over potential international fall out from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program faded. The MSCI AC Asia Pacific Index rose 0.2 percent to 153.97 as of 4:30 p.m. in Hong Kong, reversing an earlier drop of the same magnitude. Technology stocks were among the biggest boosts to the gauge after being beaten down on ...