Bloomberg Volkswagen AG pleaded guilty to misleading US regulators and customers by hiding emission levels on diesel vehicles and obstructing investigations when authorities grew suspicious. Sentencing was put off until April 21. VW entered the formal plea in Detroit federal court as it agreed to do two months ago as part of a $4.3 billion deal to settle claims ...

  Bloomberg US subprime auto lenders are losing money on car loans at the highest rate since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis as more borrowers fall behind on payments, according to S&P Global Ratings. Losses for the loans, annualized, were 9.1 percent in January from 8.5 percent in December and 7.9 percent in the first month of last ...

  Bloomberg Toronto may be next on the list of global cities with a tax on home purchases by foreigners as government officials search for ways to cool scorching price gains. Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa surprised many, saying he was reconsidering imposing a tax to curb price increases that have accelerated in Canada’s biggest city, reversing a stance last ...

  Bloomberg Iceland has fought wars to pro- tect its fishermen, most recently against the UK in the 1970s. Now, a record inflow of foreign tourists is threatening the industry that once built this tiny north Atla- ntic country. The flood of sightseers, volcano watchers and glacier trekkers is lifting the national currency, pushing up the price of Icelandic fish. ...

  You knew it all along: Economists can’t forecast the economy worth a hoot. And now we have a scholarly study that confirms it. Better yet, the corroboration comes from an impeccable source: the Federal Reserve. The study compared predictions of important economic indicators — unemployment, inflation, interest rates, gross domestic product — with the actual outcomes. There were widespread ...

  The economist Kenneth Arrow, who died last month at age 95, was a model academic — brilliant, creative, precise, unfailingly modest. If only his fellow economists would stop misrepresenting his work. In the 1950s, Arrow and others proved a theorem that, many economists believe, put a rigorous mathematical foundation beneath Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. The theorem ...

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just one of many federal agencies marked for drastic funding reductions to enable a big boost in military spending. But the cuts proposed for America’s center of weather and climate research reveal alarming pitfalls in President Donald Trump’s approach to budgeting: a reluctance to invest in the future, a disregard for ...

  At last, what South Koreans accomplished was least expected. The country’s Constitutional Court removed President Park Geun-hye from office in a unanimous 8 to 0 decision. The court’s decision marked the most stunning downfall for the South Korea’s first female leader. The ruling allows possible criminal proceedings against 65-year-old Park and makes her country’s first democratically elected leader to ...

  Bloomberg France’s Engie SA plans to sell its entire 10 percent holding in India’s biggest importer of liquefied natural gas. GDF International, an Engie unit, has written to the four Indian state-owned companies that together own half of Petronet LNG Ltd. to offer shares in proportion to their holding in the company, Petronet said in a stock-exchange filing. “It ...

  Bloomberg German developer PNE Wind AG and Norway’s Statoil ASA are asking the US government to open additional sites for offshore wind farms off the coasts of New York and Massachusetts. The sites south of Long Island, New York, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, are near existing areas already designated for offshore development, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ...