Bloomberg US President Donald Trump intensified a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on imported softwood lumber in a move that drew swift criticism from the Canadian government, which vowed to sue if needed. Trump announced the new tariff at a White House gathering of conservative journalists, shortly before the Commerce Department said it ...

  Bloomberg Britain kept to its borrowing forecasts in a pre-election boost for Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond but cracks in the public finances are appearing as consumers feel the pain from inflation. The deficit narrowed to 52 billion pounds ($66.6 billion) in the fiscal year through March, in line with the 51.7 billion pounds forecast by budget officials ...

  Bloomberg Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG said it will scout for medicines that are in earlier stages of development as acquisition price tags climb across the industry. “The price of some of these assets has increased to the point that we don’t feel like we can create value for Novartis shareholders,’’ Chief Executive Officer Joe Jimenez said on a conference ...

  Bloomberg European investors who shunned London’s commercial property in the run-up to the Brexit referendum are flocking back as the weak pound cuts prices and electoral uncertainty on the continent makes the UK seem a good place for buyers to spread their bets. Investors from Europe plowed 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) into the capital’s offices, shops and warehouses ...

  Voters in France’s presidential election are being asked to choose between supply-side economic reform, as offered by candidates like centrist Emmanuel Macron and center-right François Fillon, and demand-side reform, as promoted by the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon. The reality is that France needs both at the same time — one without the other won’t work. ...

  India’s most valuable business is earning money hand over fist from oil. Yet what’s exciting investors about Reliance Industries Ltd. are its telecoms losses. Those should go some way toward creating the Indian equivalent of Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. wireless carrier. Or at least that’s what the stock’s 38 percent jump this year in dollar terms is ...

  The global economy is gathering momentum, the International Monetary Fund has declared. That’s probably correct and undeniably encouraging, but there’s an ominous discord between this economic expansion and what’s euphemistically called “political uncertainty” — that is, the stresses caused by surging anti-trade, anti-market, anti-immigrant populism. This “uncertainty” could be the prelude to some seriously bad policies, enough to derail ...

  For centuries, Afghanistan has been a cauldron of chaos, conflict and anarchy. But the chaos has not been created or opted by Afghans. It has been engineered, exported to, and planted in the country. The foreign invasions in past decades, insurgency and civil war have totally destroyed Afghanistan, which has been haunted by great game between big powers jostling ...

  When it emerged last week that China Minsheng Banking Corp. had sold $436 million in suspect wealth-management products, fears rose of a collapse in the loosely regulated market for such products. It now looks like a more mundane case of forgery involving a branch manager. But that’s not exactly reassuring: In fact, it suggests a different kind of systemic ...

  A recurring theme at Gadfly is Amazon.com Inc.’s ambitions to do everything under the sun. It looks as if the company now wants to become a quasi app store similar to Apple or Google’s mobile versions. Amazon has created a single spot for people to sign up to digital subscriptions from companies including the Los Angeles Times and digital ...