Bloomberg Canada’s Finance Minister is sticking by his pledge to lower the nation’s debt ratio, signaling the government won’t push much deeper into deficit when it delivers its budget this week. Bill Morneau said he remains committed to the notion a falling level of debt relative to the total size of the economy shows fiscal prudence. The country’s low ...

  Bloomberg European Central Bank Governing Council member Ignazio Visco said the central bank could step away from its commitment to keep interest rates low for a long time after quantitative easing stops. While the ECB’s current guidance foresees that borrowing costs will stay at current or lower levels “for an extended period” and won’t rise until “well past” the ...

  Bloomberg Meetup.com is taking a leap into the Trump resistance. The New York-based networking site will unveil plans in the coming days to partner with a labor group — under the guidance of a former Hillary Clinton aide — to coordinate protests among more than 120,000 activists already involved with anti-Trump Meetup groups. It’s a risky move for a ...

  Bloomberg The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada will review the business practices of the country’s banks after reports of tellers allegedly pressuring customers to buy products to meet sales goals. The federal agency, which seeks to ensure financial institutions comply with consumer-protection measures, said Wednesday its next review would begin in April and focus on banks’ practices around express ...

  Bloomberg Swiss watchmakers are diving further into the unproven smartwatch market, with Montblanc, TAG Heuer and Tissot seeking to attract younger shoppers with a technology the industry largely snubbed until consumers began turning away from traditional timepieces. TAG Heuer recently unveiled the new generation of a $1,650 smartwatch it makes with partners Google and Intel. Montblanc followed with the ...

  NEW YORK / AP Many people are still not taking routine precautions to safeguard their email accounts — and hackers are exploiting that. According to US officials who filed charges in a massive Yahoo break-in, Russian hackers didn’t have to work very hard to break into people’s email accounts, even those belonging to government officials or powerful executives. You ...

  Bloomberg Duan Yongping is convinced Tim Cook didn’t have a clue who he was when they first met a couple years ago. The Apple boss probably does now. Duan is the reclusive billionaire who founded Oppo and Vivo, the twin smartphone brands that dealt the world’s largest company a stinging defeat in China last year. Once derided as cheap ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM The value of shares bought by foreign traders at the UAE financial markets stood at AED21.8 billion in the first two months of 2017. This volatility reflects high frequency of entering of this investor category to the market compared to the same period in 2016. An Emirates News Agency (WAM) analysis shows that foreign purchases ...

  It’s time to take control of Medicaid before it takes control of us. Unless we act — and there is little evidence that we will — Medicaid increasingly becomes another mechanism by which government skews spending toward the old and away from the young. In the raging debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), this is a subject that ...

  Have money, can’t buy. That’s the dilemma facing China’s drugmakers as they look to acquire overseas assets to sate the country’s growing healthcare needs. Snapping up vitamin producers and the like hasn’t proved a problem, but snaring actual pharmaceuticals manufacturers is a different matter, and will be put to the test as Germany’s Stada Arzneimittel AG hits the brakes ...