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Bloomberg Thousands of people gathered in a square in Hong Kong’s city centre on Sunday for a peaceful rally under the watchful gaze of riot police who kept their distance from the event while patrolling the area. The authorised meeting was held by Hong Kong Civil Assembly Team, which described it as a “pre-march assembly” for a rally scheduled for ...

Bloomberg Thousands of people joined a rally in Thailand to protest against the military-backed government and call for more political freedom, less than a year after a disputed general election. The demonstrators gathered on Sunday in a Bangkok park for an early-morning protest jog against the administration led by prime minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha. Former army chief Prayuth seized power in ...

One of the controversies that swirls around the Federal Reserve — America’s central bank — is whether it could rescue the economy from collapse in the event of another financial crisis. Among economists, there are many skeptics, but Ben Bernanke, who was Fed chairman during the 2007-09 Great Recession, isn’t one of them. In a long and detailed paper, Bernanke ...

Give Macy’s Inc. a polite clap, and no more, for kicking off the retail holiday reporting season in reasonable style. The department store giant said that like-for-like sales from company-owned stores fell 0.7% in November and December, compared with the year earlier period. That’s by no means stellar, but it was much better than its dismal third quarter, when same-store ...

A perennial risk in the airline industry is that executives splash money on shiny new planes but fail to make an adequate return. Willie Walsh, the chief executive officer of International Consolidated Airlines Group, has tried to do things differently by — shock! — insisting that the British, Irish and Spanish airlines he oversees make decent money. (Created in 2011, ...

The start of a new year brings with it a raft of data on the world’s energy systems. So far, electricity sector figures show a transition well underway — some sources increasing, others collapsing. Each market is different, but the trends in markets as diverse as the UK, Spain, Australia and Texas all show profound changes in what is a ...

The Carlos Ghosn circus opened in Lebanon, with the ringmaster demanding rapt attention. Some 120 journalists from around the world, armed with cameras and cellphones, crammed in a room to hear Ghosn defend himself for the first time since he escaped from Japan last week. Ghosn, the former chairman of Nissan Motor Co. — and the creator of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi ...

CLSA Ltd. is losing its identity. That’s bad news for its parent’s ambitions to build a globally competitive Chinese investment bank in the mold of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citic Securities Co. is tightening control over CLSA following an exodus of employees and top executives from the Hong Kong-based brokerage last year, Cathy Chan of Bloomberg News reported, citing people ...

Flashback to mid-December. British voters had just delivered a decisive national election victory to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives with two full weekends left before Christmas. Expectations were high that shoppers, giddy at the prospect of an end to political gridlock and repetitive threats of hard Brexit, would rush to the stores to make up for lost time in their holiday preparations ...

Bloomberg Corporate profits likely dropped for a second straight quarter at the end of 2019, dragging down annual earnings growth to the smallest in three years. A lot of investors are fine with that. Put it down to the nature of the stock market, where returns tend to anticipate changes in earnings growth. As the S&P 500 notches records, investors ...