It’s been more than three months since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on television to tell his people that 86 percent of their currency would be worthless in a few hours. Since then, his government has scrambled to find justification for such an unprecedented and draconian decision — one justification after another, as it happens. First, the goal ...

  Packaged-food investors, you’re out of luck … for now. Speculation about 3G Capital’s next target has been bubbling since the private equity firm orchestrated the merger of Kraft Foods Group Inc. and H.J. Heinz in 2015. We finally know what it’s chosen: Unilever on Friday confirmed Kraft Heinz Co. had offered $143 billion to acquire the European consumer goods ...

  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto, penned clearly in response to accusations leveled at the social network in the wake of the bitter US election campaign, is a scary, dystopian document. It shows that Facebook — launched, in Zuckerberg’s own words five years ago, to “extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships” — is turning into something of an ...

  Bloomberg The latest robot seeking to find the 600 tons of nuclear fuel and debris that melted down six year ago in Japan’s wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant met its end in less than a day. The scorpion-shaped machine, built by Toshiba Corp., entered the No. 2 reactor core and stopped 3 meters (9.8 feet) short of a grate ...

  Bloomberg In just a decade, Russia has transformed its sugar industry. The country, which was once the world’s top importer of raw sweetener, is now on the verge of becoming a net exporter. Aided by an import tax Russia introduced in 2004 to shield domestic firms from foreign competition, producers have been able to invest in making beet refining ...

  Bloomberg Forget about Donald Trump. The global reflation trade may have another driver that proves to be more durable: China’s rebounding factory prices. The producer price index has staged an 10 percentage-point turnaround in the past 10 months, posting for January a 6.9 percent jump from a year earlier. Though much of that reflects a rebound in commodity prices ...

  Bloomberg A panel of state finance ministers cleared a bill that will compensate states for any revenue lost as a new nationwide goods and services tax is introduced in July. The government will now present the compensation bill in the second phase of the parliament’s budget session, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters in the northwestern city of Udaipur ...

TOKYO / AP Japan’s economy expanded at a steadily slowing pace in 2016, though a modest recovery in exports helped offset sluggish spending by households and businesses, according to data reported. The 1.0 percent annual pace of expansion for the year compared with 1.2 percent growth in 2015. For all but one quarter of the year, private demand was flat ...

  Bloomberg After a rocky start, Boeing Co. Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg appears to have gained the ear of President Donald Trump. The US planemaker was one of Trump’s first post-election corporate targets, and a tweet about soaring Air Force One costs briefly tanked the company’s shares in December. But the Twitter tirade also gave Muilenburg an opening to ...

  Bloomberg Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. halted the launch of its second rocket in as many months on Saturday, about 10 seconds before its scheduled liftoff. “All systems go, except the movement trace of an upper stage engine steering hydraulic piston was slightly odd. Standing down to investigate,” Musk said in a Twitter post. The rocket, which was ...