Berlin / AFP Germany’s finance minister on Thursday voiced backing for the French government’s labour reforms that have sparked crippling strikes, saying France was capable of withstanding such social opposition. “France is obviously not unreformable,” Wolfgang Schaeuble told journalists, adding that President Francois Hollande “is right” to champion the reforms. He shrugged off the impact of the strikes that have ...

  Bloomberg Former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, a campaigner for Britain to leave the European Union in next month’s referendum, needs to be re-educated about the way the 28-nation bloc works, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday at the Group of Seven summit in central Japan. Asked about Johnson’s comments linking the bloc to Adolf Hitler and ...

  Budapest / AFP Hungary’s central bank said on Thursday it was now ready to leave interest rates alone after cutting a key rate to a record level. The bank, the MNB, cut the benchmark rate to a fresh record low of 0.9 percent Tuesday, in what it says is now the end of its third interest rate easing cycle since ...

  Paris / AFP The global financial crisis may have caused an additional 500,000 cancer deaths from 2008-2010, a new study said on Thursday, with patients locked out of treatment because of unemployment and healthcare cuts. The figures were extrapolated from an observed rise in cancer deaths for every percentage increase in unemployment, and every drop in public healthcare spending. “From ...

  Bloomberg The number of U.S. jobs in solar energy overtook those in oil and natural gas extraction for the first time last year, helping drive a global surge in employment in the clean-energy business as fossil-fuel companies faltered. Employment in the U.S. solar business grew 12 times faster than overall job creation, the International Renewable Energy Agency said in ...

  Bloomberg Coca-Cola Co. is bringing in a Mexican partner to handle bottling in parts of the U.S. as the beverage giant boosts its reliance on franchise operators to make and distribute its drinks. Arca Continental SAB, Latin America’s second-biggest Coca-Cola bottler, will help oversee territories in Texas and parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas, the companies said in ...

  Bloomberg After two notes sales this week left primary dealers with the fewest Treasuries on record, investors will get another chance to load up on U.S. government debt on Thursday as seven-year securities are auctioned. The Treasury is scheduled to sell $28 billion of seven-year notes, the last of three fixed-rate aussctions this week totaling $88 billion. A gauge ...

  Rio De Janeiro, Brazil / AFP Thousands of Brazilians lined up on Wednesday at a Rio jobs fair, many of them so desperate to escape the country’s economic nosedive that they said they’d take anything on offer. In a symbol of Brazil’s precipitous slide into economic hardship, the almost stationary queue stretched right across a large central square. They were ...

  Bloomberg Mexico’s central bank has the ‘highest hope’ of keeping its rate decisions to scheduled meetings, Governor Agustin Carstens said, quieting market speculation of another surprise increase in borrowing costs. One-year interest-rate swaps fell. The recent peso depreciation has been driven by fundamentals and not by an attack from speculators like the one that took place in February when ...

  New YorK / AFP Citigroup and affiliates were fined $425 million over charges they attempted to manipulate Libor and other leading financial benchmarks, US regulators have announced. Citigroup, which was supposed to submit data on actual transactions to help set the internationally-used benchmarks, instead gave false information to benefit its trading positions, according to the cases. In one of ...