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Bloomberg Ricky Moore, who stages the Hypnotist Laughter Show at comedy clubs in northern England, took a phone call a few weeks ago that turned out to be an unusual booking. He was asked if he’d be willing to sign a letter urging Britons to quit the European Union. He agreed, even though he didn’t know who exactly was calling ...

Bloomberg Ukraine’s political gridlock, already holding up billions of dollars in aid, is also threatening financial stability and postponing monetary easing, according to the nation’s central bank governor. Delays in talks on a cabinet revamp present a further danger to the hryvnia after the currency slumped 9 percent against the dollar this year, Valeriya Gontareva said in an interview. Policy ...

Bloomberg When it comes to fiscal discipline in the European Union, three is the magic number. That’s a deficit limit of 3 percent of GDP, and five EU states will make the budgetary bad books this year by breaching that level. These five — the U.K., France, Spain, Greece, and Croatia — include three of Europe’s five largest economies. Three ...

Bloomberg Fidelity Capital Markets said the difference between yields on Treasuries and other bonds makes investing in the U.S. attractive, as America’s premium approached the most in a decade. Treasuries due in 10 years or longer yielded more than 1.5 percentage points more than their counterparts around the world, based on Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. The premium was ...

Bloomberg Brazil analysts reduced their 2016 economic growth forecast for the ninth straight week as a political crisis grips the nation and further dims the outlook for turnaround. Economists lowered their 2016 economic forecast to a contraction of 3.6 percent, and reduced their 2017 outlook for the first time in more than a month to 0.44 percent growth, according to ...

Bloomberg Canadian regulators extended by three months Petroliam Nasional Bhd.’s application to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on the nation’s Pacific coast so the Malaysian company can provide more information about the project’s environmental impacts. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency announced the extension in a filing after Pacific NorthWest LNG, as the project is known, detailed changes to its ...

Bloomberg Chile’s economy grew less that expected in the fourth quarter, expanding at the second-slowest pace in six years, as two years of weak growth was exacerbated by a renewed decline in manufacturing. Gross domestic product grew 1.3 percent from a year earlier, the central bank said on its website. From the previous quarter, GDP expanded 0.1 percent. Increased fiscal ...

Bloomberg Argentina’s peso is the world’s most volatile currency, and that’s fine with the central bank. Big swings are usually not something policy makers want. Officials around the world have procedures in place to ward off the rapid ups and downs that make it difficult for businesses to plan and leave savers nervous about staying in the national currency. But ...

BAGHDAD / AP It was a tense confrontation between two forces supposed to be on the same side in Iraq. First, heavily armed police, led by the interior minister, waded into a Shiite militia base south of Baghdad and arrested its deputy commander, accused of organizing attacks on Sunni mosques. They loaded the man, Ali Reda, into an armored SUV. ...

Cairo / AFP The Arab League on Monday rejected Kurdish-led moves for a federal system of government in Syria, charging that they would lead to the break-up of the war-torn country. League deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli said the pan-Arab bloc would not recognise last week’s unilateral proclamation by the Kurds and their Arab and Assyrian Christian allies. “The ...