Is imported steel a threat to national security? How about aluminum? The White House has its suspicions, and plans to invoke an arcane statute to investigate. If the probes turn up anything, President Donald Trump will have essentially unlimited power to restrict or limit imports in response. Despite the administration’s claims, this sounds like a pretext for imposing tariffs ...

  The US has sent aircraft carrier battle group and submarine in the Korean Peninsula; President Donald Trump warned a “major conflict” with North Korea was possible if diplomatic solutions fail; Senator John McCain said the US leader understood that military action was a last resort and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson mounted an effort at the United Nations to ...

  There still hasn’t been anything close to the kind of spectacular bust seen in the early 2000s. As of today, all of the smart people who called a bubble during the past six years are still waiting for their predictions to be borne out Calling bubbles is hard. For example, take tech startups. In 2011, billionaire Mark Cuban — ...

  Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos has made a career of being first in e-commerce. But in one critical area, he’s falling behind — thanks to Washington. While Bezos has been eager to deliver orders to customers in the US with drones, Amazon’s efforts have so far been stymied by outdated regulations. Meanwhile, JD.com Inc., an Amazon-like Chinese retailer, is soaring ...

  Can Marine Le Pen still win the French election if her opponents don’t vote in the run-off vote on May 7? After many potential Hillary Clinton voters, certain of her victory, failed to turn out last year, Donald Trump won the US presidential election, so, by analogy, such an outcome seems somewhat possible. Yet there are strong reasons why ...

  DUBAI / Reuters Higher petrochemical share prices helped lift the Saudi Arabian bourse index on Sunday after strong first-quarter earnings in the sector, but other regional market indexes sagged in thin trade. The Saudi index rose 1.0 percent as Saudi Kayan Petrochemical hit its 10 percent daily price limit after the company reported a net profit of 265.5 million ...

  Bloomberg Bond traders demonstrated this week that for all the doubts about the Trump trade, wagers on quicker inflation still have life. Look no further than the US 10-year breakeven rate. It climbed the most on a weekly basis this year, rising back toward 2 percent, suggesting the market is starting to hop back on the inflation bandwagon. The ...

  Bloomberg US natural gas producers are running hard to stand still. The number of rigs drilling for gas has almost doubled since August, but output continues to fall. Even accounting for a lag between the start of drilling and first production, the drop in output is striking — a well in the Marcellus Shale, America’s most prolific reservoir of ...

  Bloomberg The White House has a new darling in the energy sector: liquefied natural gas. First Gary Cohn — President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser — voiced support for a terminal in the US Northwest that would send tankers full of LNG to Asia. Then, Energy Secretary Rick Perry praised an export terminal proposed by Exxon Mobil Corp. and ...

  Bloomberg Exxon Mobil Corp. has boosted it’s dividend every April for at least a decade, delivering more than $98 billion directly to shareholders. This year, the payout will likely rise again. The open question is by how much. Exxon slowed quarterly dividend growth the last two years as the industry fought through the worst price rout in a generation. ...