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The fires currently consuming Brazil’s Amazon rainforest seem a world away from the tense diplomacy in the US trade war with China. In truth, they’re more closely connected than you might suspect. One of Beijing’s main acts of retaliation in the fight has been to freeze purchases of the 30 million metric tons to 40 million tons of American soybeans ...

Who knew the work of disciplined inventory and expense management could get Wall Street this excited? Or, at least that’s what I think is driving a surge in shares of Nordstrom Inc., which reported second-quarter earnings. The retailer beat analysts’ earnings per share estimates, an outcome it chalked up to deft expense control. But, to my mind, practically everything else ...

When he failed to ignite a continental uprising against South America’s 19th-century colonial masters, Simon Bolivar was crestfallen. “He who serves the revolution plows the seas,” he despaired. Happily, Bolivar got it backward. From the Yucatan Peninsula to the Strait of Magellan, aquaculture is revolutionising food production. Plowing the oceans and inland waters, Latin America and the Caribbean expanded more ...

Bloomberg US equity-index futures turned higher along with shares in Europe after a down session in Asia on Monday as investors assessed the latest developments in the Sino-American trade war. The dollar strengthened. Contracts on all three main US equity indexes rose after President Donald Trump said that prospects for a deal with China were better now than at any ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong stocks slumped and the yuan weakened to an 11-year low as concern over the US-China trade war spurred risk-off sentiment. The Hang Seng Index closed down 1.9 percentin Hong Kong, after falling as much as 3.6 percent. Meat producer WH Group Ltd, AAC Technologies Holdings Inc and Cnooc Ltd were among the worst performers. The yuan slid ...

Bloomberg Most Germans live by the credo that saving is a virtue, but the European Central Bank’s (ECB) negative interest rates risk making a mockery of the national obsession, prompting politicians to seek ways to insulate thrifty citizens and keep the burden on the country’s beleaguered banks. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz says he’ll look into whether it’s possible to prevent ...

Bloomberg Never before have interest rates in the world’s biggest covered-bond market been this low. And rarely has investor demand for the debt been so high. Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco) is among investors embracing Danish mortgage-backed covered bonds, even as negative interest rates mean investors face built-in losses on some bonds. Data provided by Danske Bank show issuers are ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) officials expressed concern at their latest policy meeting that some observers doubted their ability to restore price stability, prompting the Governing Council to plan for potential fresh monetary stimulus. Council members broadly agreed that a downward trend in inflation expectations was a cause for concern, and that the euro area’s economic slowdown was likely to ...

Bloomberg Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) is seeing an uptick in bad loans, providing validation to short-seller concerns that credit conditions are worsening. Investors and analysts have been watching for signs of deteriorating loans since short sellers earlier this year said that CIBC and other banks are ill-prepared for worsening credit conditions. CIBC’s soured-loan provisions totaled C$291 million ($219 ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc cut about 10 banking jobs in Japan and Australia, eliminating the merger advisory teams based in those countries. The London-based bank will instead serve clients out of Hong Kong, Singapore and Southeast Asia, the person said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. The debt capital markets group and sector teams were largely ...