Bloomberg PayPal Holdings Inc. CEO Dan Schulman is getting investors to embrace his strategy of converting the online payments platform into a digital wallet, even if it requires deal-making that may diminish profit margins. The company reported first-quarter results that showed Schulman’s strategy is working and raised its annual forecast. Sales and profit topped analysts’ projections as PayPal added ...

  Bloomberg Euro-area economic confidence jumped to the highest in almost a decade this month, a testament to a continued improvement that may soon prompt a policy shift at the European Central Bank. The index of executive and consumer sentiment surged to 109.6 in April from a revised 108 in March, the European Commission in Brussels said on Thursday. That’s ...

  Bloomberg US coal has become entangled in a trade war between the US and Canada over lumber. British Columbia Premier Christy Clark urged Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an open letter to ban US coal shipments from the country’s westernmost province in retaliation for the Trump administration’s new tariffs on softwood lumber. The move sent Canadian export terminal ...

  Bloomberg Amgen Inc.’s new cholesterol drug is still struggling to gain traction, missing analysts’ estimates at a time when the biotechnology giant is anxious for its newer drugs to make up for slowing sales of its older ones. Sales of the drug, called Repatha, in the first quarter were $49 million, the company said in a statement. That was ...

  Bloomberg Britain’s largest business lobby said the UK and the rest of the European Union need to settle any exit bill fast and get cracking on a new trade deal. Confederation of British Industry Director General Carolyn Fairbairn said a good Brexit arrangement isn’t about “doing the UK a favor,” but based on “solid economic reasoning for both sides.” ...

  The French are too intellectually vain to borrow others’ political ideas, but too interested in style not to appreciate and appropriate that of others. So, on May 7 they might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama, a freshman senator, became a national Rorschach test, upon whom Americans projected their longings. Emmanuel Macron, 39, is ...

  Globalization has fallen out of fashion. Free trade breeds inequality, the critics say. International cooperation precludes national development. Closed economies are preferable to open ones. These statements could not be more misguided. The main reason I know this has to do not with job creation or productive employment or even global gross domestic product. It has to do with ...

  Donald Trump is not wrong: Judging a presidency on its first 100 days is an inherently ridiculous exercise. There is, however, a less ridiculous way to assess Trump’s first few months, and he does not fare well. It’s worth noting that when President Franklin Roosevelt first used the 100-day standard in a 1933 radio address, he was referring to ...

  Minimum-wage policy is a fraught issue. People involved in the public debate — writers, business leaders, politicians and think-tankers — often defend their positions with a passion and commitment reserved for religious disputes. That makes it challenging to bring data to bear on the conversation. Nevertheless, as the weight of evidence piles up, it’s getting harder and harder to ...

  Good news! Twitter’s business is not doing terribly by the low, low standards of Twitter. Well done. In the first quarter, Twitter Inc.’s revenue fell from the year-ago quarter for the first time. Twitter doesn’t turn a profit, and now its sales are shrinking, too. That is … not good. But Twitter executives had told investors to brace for ...