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Bloomberg North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspected a new submarine that would soon be deployed to waters between the peninsula and Japan, state media said, a move that comes as his regime tries to step up its ability to launch missiles from subs. There was no indication in the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report whether the submarine was capable ...

Bloomberg US stocks rose as investors assessed a batch of strong earnings and signs of progress in trade talks with China. Treasuries fell and the dollar rose. The S&P 500 climbed for a second day, though gains faltered as the index pushed back toward 3,000. Coca-Cola climbed to a record, while Lockheed Martin and United Technologies jumped after the trio ...

Bloomberg The pound slipped on concern the UK may leave the European Union without a divorce deal after members of the Conservative party voted for Boris Johnson to be the next prime minister. Sterling fell for a third day after Johnson, who has vowed to march the UK out of the EU with or without a deal by October 31, ...

Now that Christine Lagarde has announ-ced her resignation as managing director of the International Monetary Fu-nd, German chancellor Angela Merkel says Europeans “again” have a “claim” to fill what is arguably the world’s most important economic job. Merkel is invoking a decades-old political deal, which gives Europe the IMF leadership in return for allowing Americans to run the World Bank. ...

China’s bond market has been eerily quiet lately. Over the past year, investors in China’s US dollar bonds had gotten used to the idea of defaults. As early as 2015, the government started allowing some state-owned enterprises to renege on their commitments, a painful but welcome step that helps differentiate healthy firms and troubled ones. But there hadn’t been a ...

Slimming down appears to be paying off for Novartis AG. CEO Vas Narasimhan has refocussed the Swiss pharma giant around drugs by selling off eye-care business Alcon and its remaining consumer-health inte- rests. Second-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations and a big guidance boost showed the benefits of the strategy. Shares hit an all-time high in early trading even ...

What’s wrong with a 50 basis-point interest-rate cut? I’m all for central banks doing their utmost to support high, durable and inclusive growth. But this doesn’t mean throwing everything at the wall when the economy is doing relatively well, financial markets are buoyant, and policy ammunition is limited. Growing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 50 ...

Debt is the crux of the matter. If you want to understand what makes the world vulnerable to a global recession or, possibly, something much worse, you’ve got to come to grips with the worldwide debt buildup. It’s not the only candidate for calamity, but it ranks first among the possibilities. At the end of March, worldwide debt totalled $246.5 ...

Volkswagen AG announced that 2019 would be the last model year the Golf SportWagen and Alltrack, the automaker’s station wagons, will be produced for the US. The German company has sold wagons in the US since 1966, starting with the Type 3 “Squareback” model. “Customers are speaking clearly about their preferences — it’s an SUV world now,” the company said ...

Money gets a bad rap. In the current environment, amid inequality not seen since the 1920s, too many people find it too easy to disparage wealth and the quest for material goods. There is no doubt that lifestyle creep and the hedonic treadmill are not the paths to true happiness. But what we see today is a backlash caused, in ...