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Bloomberg Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (Sabic) posted its lowest quarterly profit in at least a decade as the chemical maker took an impairment charge and cheaper oil put pressure on its product prices. Net income slumped 86% from the previous year to 830 million riyals, while sales fell 23% for the same period to 33.7 billion riyals, the company known ...

In the tempestuous debates about immigration policy, the humble H-1B temporary visa tends to be overlooked. Streams of desperate Central Americans marching toward the border tend to evoke strong emotions on all sides, while tech professionals from India working in Silicon Valley elicit fewer objections. But H-1B workers are important to national prosperity, and the program is under threat from ...

Whoever came up with the Article 50 process for leaving the European Union probably never thought it would be used, let alone turned into a maddening form of procedural torture worthy of Kafka. Brexit was meant to have been wrapped up in March, yet the UK’s inability to decide what it wants has frustrated the best-laid plans of Brussels’s technocrats. ...

Masayoshi Son just pulled off a deal that gives him the best of both worlds. He’s found a way to keep a foot in WeWork without getting it stuck in the company’s quicksand of cash. SoftBank Group Corp.’s chairman announced that he’s increasing the company’s stake in WeWork to 80% ( from 29%). And yet, the parent isn’t welcoming the ...

Some good news for the European Central Bank (ECB). The German government has nominated Isabel Schnabel, an accomplished economist at the University of Bonn, to replace her compatriot Sabine Lautenschlaeger on the ECB’s executive board. Lautenschlaeger is quitting after the central bank’s decision to restart large-scale bond purchases (known as quantitative easing). It’s an anachronism that Germany, France and Italy ...

Driven in part by soaring public debt, Indonesian President Joko Widodo is going soft as he starts his final term. He’s emphasising “soft infrastructure’’ such as legal reform, education and counter-corruption while quietly easing back on the physical airports, roads and the like that were the key priority in the first five years. But he should beware of putting Indonesia ...

India’s best-known software exporter is facing an impossible trinity of sorts: Out of sales, margins and governance, Infosys Ltd. can hit only two goals at a time. Or so it would appear from yet-to-be-proven whistle-blower allegations against Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh and Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy that they used hyper-aggressive accounting practices to hide from investors the lack ...

Someone had to take the fall for the latest disastrous turn in Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis and that someone appears to be commercial airplanes chief Kevin McAllister. Boeing abruptly announced that McAllister is stepping down. He joined in 2016 from General Electric Co. and oversaw the unit responsible for the troubled Max, which has been grounded for seven months ...

Bloomberg Beneath the din of earnings, clanging economic alarms and the blare of a political circus, US investors are quietly rediscovering their nerve. With the S&P 500 just touching a record, it may sound odd to suggest there was a lack of confidence to begin with. But gains this year have been built on caution as investors chased the safest, ...

Bloomberg The pound may be back from the precipice, but it’s still some way from sunlit uplands. A formal request to delay Brexit has all but removed the risk of a sterling crash triggered by a no-deal scenario. Instead, it’s left the pound in limbo and exposed to a tangle of political quarrels on both sides of the English Channel. ...