The plumber who’ll sort out India’s bad-loan mess is about to get powerful new tools, and an overflowing toilet will soon be clean. Or that’s how investors are reacting to weaker-than-expected quarterly earnings from the country’s largest private-sector bank by assets. How sentiment changes. At the end of 2015, when concerns over Indian lenders’ balance sheets reigned supreme, ICICI ...

  A hacker who has unsuccessfully tried to hold Netflix for ransom has achieved an unexpected result: His failure shows that subscription-based business models in content distribution is making piracy pointless. Intellectual property owners’ slowness in adopting these models is the only reason content is still being pirated. Someone calling himself (or herself, or themselves) TheDarkOverlord stole most of the ...

  Bloomberg Royal Dutch Shell Plc showed it has adapted to a world of lower oil prices, generating a surge in cash that allowed it to pay dividends while reducing debt. The Anglo-Dutch company’s first-quarter performance helps validate Chief Executive Officer Ben Van Beurden’s $54 billion purchase of BG Group Plc — for which some shareholders complained he overpaid — ...

  Bloomberg Natural gas in balmy Texas is feeling the chill of California’s snowy peaks 1,200 miles away. West Coast power producers are ditching gas in favor of cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power, which is surging after the wettest year ever across the Northern Sierra Nevada range. Much of that moisture fell as snow which is now melting, soaking fields, filling ...

  Bloomberg Oil resumed its decline as US production increased for an 11th week in the longest run of gains since 2012. Futures lost as much as 1.1 percent in New York after climbing 0.3 percent. Crude output rose to 9.29 million barrels a day, the highest level since August 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration. US inventories fell ...

  Bloomberg Sunrun Inc., the largest independent US rooftop company, fell the most in more than 11 months after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether the company adequately disclosed how many customers canceled contracts. The San Francisco-based rooftop installer dropped 8.8 percent to $4.75 at the close in New York, the most ...

  Bloomberg China’s deleveraging campaign is providing a reality check to the fledgling municipal bond market. Set up in 2015 to bring transparency to local-government borrowing practices, the new market benefited from the perception that Beijing had the provinces’ backs, with yields largely on par with the sovereign despite some weak municipal balance sheets. Not anymore — a clampdown on ...

  Bloomberg Australia would block any attempt to move BHP Billiton Ltd.’s main sharemarket listing to the UK as proposed by New York-based activist investor Elliott Management Corp., Treasurer Scott Morrison said. “It is unthinkable that any Australian government could allow this original Big Australian to head offshore,” Morrison said in a statement. If BHP implemented Elliott’s proposals, “it may ...

  Bloomberg A surging rupee, rising currency reserves and a comfortable current-account gap could see India’s central bank consider relaxing rules on outward investments, paving the way for domestic companies to step up their shopping abroad, especially in Latin America and Africa. An uptick in overseas acquisitions would help keep a lid on the rupee, which is among the top ...

  Bloomberg Coal India Ltd. may keep production subdued after it fell to the lowest seasonal level in three years as the world’s biggest miner of the fuel seeks to cut inventories. Output in April dropped to the least for the month since 2014, and shipments surpassed production by the biggest volume in records going back almost four years. The ...