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When Mike Ashley offers you a lifeline, it’s worth taking. That is the message from Debenhams Plc’s profit warning. The department store chain said it would no longer meet the estimate it published less than two months ago for full-year pre-tax profit of 8 million pounds ($10.5 million). It did not specify a new target. The market capitalisation says everything ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) surprised financial markets with moves to loosen monetary policy. The prospects for growth in the euro zone have dimmed lately, and policy was going to be tweaked at some point unless things picked up. But a change wasn’t expected so soon. ECB President Mario Draghi and his colleagues are apparently worried. They have reason to ...

Trade talks between the US and China seem to be hurtling towards a predictable conclusion — the signing of a shallow deal that doesn’t solve the real issues dividing the world’s two largest economies. The coup de grace will likely come later this month in another high-profile summit between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. It’s time to admit the ...

Vodafone Group Plc’s new boss needed some luck. The financing markets appear to be favuoring Nick Read as the UK mobile phone giant prepares to splash out on buying a huge chunk of John Malone’s European cable empire. Read unveiled a 4 billion-euro ($4.5 billion) financing package for the purchase, which should help the company create a converged mobile, broadband ...

Microsoft has unveiled the results of a survey of business leaders on the topic of artificial intelligence. The findings are surprising: German and Russian entrepreneurs and executives appear to come out ahead of those from the US and other advanced European economies when it comes to adopting the technology. Mostly, however, this and several other studies confirm a frustrating problem: ...

Bloomberg US stocks bounced back from the worst week of the year, as the latest retail-sales data boosted confidence that the economy isn’t headed for a downturn. Treasuries slipped and the dollar held steady. The S&P 500 rose for the first time in six days, while the Nasdaq 100 jumped after Nvidia agreed to a deal and Apple was upgraded. ...

Bloomberg Indian stocks rose, with the benchmark equity index climbing to a more than five-month high, after the election commission set a date range for national polls, and said the result will be unveiled on May 23. The S&P BSE Sensex advanced 1 percent to 37,054.10, its highest close since September 19. The gauge rose 1.7 percent last week for ...

Bloomberg Indian lenders haven’t fully passed on the central bank’s latest interest rate cut to borrowers, pressuring the monetary authority to loosen policy even more to support economic growth. A mismatch between deposits and credit growth, and competition from the government for small-savings mean banks face a high cost of capital, limiting their ability to transmit monetary policy easing. Bankers ...

Bloomberg ING Groep NV reduced its bonus pool by 25 percent after a year marred by a record money-laundering settlement and public discontent in the Netherlands over banker pay. The country’s largest lender paid out 303 million euros ($340 million) in bonuses for 2018, down from 403 million euros the year before, according to its latest annual report. ING said ...

Bloomberg Mario Draghi’s latest and potentially last salvo to boost the euro-area economy risks not being enough. The European Central Bank president, who will leave office in October after spending his entire eight-year tenure crisis-fighting, announced a new round of long-term loans to banks and promised interest rates won’t be lifted from record lows until 2020. The fresh effort to ...