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Bloomberg U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s statement that his new budget “puts the next generation first” isn’t enough to protect subsequent generations from the consequences of climate change, critics said. Just three months after the U.K. joined 195 other countries in a climate deal in a bid to restrain rising global temperatures by curbing emissions, Osborne’s budget cut ...

Bloomberg Hungary expanded its arsenal of state subsidies for home purchases to help revive the construction sector, triggering criticism that the plan offers inadequate protection and arbitrary criteria for savers. Members of the new building societies, known as NOK, will be eligible for subsidies of up to 300,000 forint ($1,090) a year if they pledge contributions for 10 to 15 ...

Bloomberg Norway’s central bank cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low and signaled it’s prepared to ease policy further to ward off a recession in western Europe’s biggest crude oil producer. The overnight deposit rate was lowered by 25 basis points to 0.50 percent, the Oslo-based central bank said on Thursday. The decision was predicted by 18 of ...

Bloomberg As cement sets and hardens, it binds materials together, creating a stronger whole. LafargeHolcim’s first yearly results as a combined company gave little indication that their union has done similar. The Franco-Swiss cement producer, the world’s biggest, booked a 3-billion Swiss franc ($3.1-billion) impairment in the fourth quarter, attributed mostly to Brazil, Russia, Iraq and China. As a consequence, ...

The Obama administration is moving towards what could be a dangerous showdown with China over the South China Sea. The confrontation has been building for the past three years, as China has constructed artificial islands off its southern coast and installed missiles and radar in disputed waters, despite US warnings. It could come to a head this spring, when an ...

The Bank of Korea is planning for a cashless society by 2020. Swedes are making the shift. I am intrigued but also troubled. There’s a lot to like about the idea of a cashless society, starting with its effect on crime. The payoff to mugging people or snatching their bags has already declined dramatically, simply because fewer and fewer people ...

A host of risks — including turbulence in financial markets, slower growth in economies like China, weak growth in other developed countries and prospects of Brexit — cast shadow on British economy, forcing it to take more austerity measures. With such measures in place, it is quite interesting to see where the additional cuts would be made. Presenting the annual ...

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s latest economic projections contain an encoded message crucial to understanding the central bank’s policies: Inflation has been stuck below the Fed’s target in part because officials don’t actually want to get it back up. It’s important to recognize that the Summary of Economic Projections, released four times a year, does not consist of forecasts about the ...

Asia’s major economies marked International Women’s Day 2016 with relatively little fanfare, despite the demographic imperative that confronts the aging populations of China, Japan and South Korea. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian corporate boardrooms have low gender diversity despite moves such as Japan’s “Womenomics,” although the bank blames societal issues rather than deliberate hiring decisions. In its ...

The value of the Canadian dollar and the price of oil, one of the nation’s top exports, have both tumbled to near record lows. But those details — and the apparent demise of the Keystone XL pipeline — don’t begin to tell the story of what lies ahead for the economy of Canada, America’s second-largest trading partner. Last year, Canadian ...