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Bloomberg The much-anticipated alliance announcement by Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co left investors feeling let down as it lacked a big-bucks plan to join forces on electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Wall Street was hoping for a blockbuster deal, such as the billions of dollars General Motors Co. landed for its self-driving unit from Honda and SoftBank Vision Fund ...

Bloomberg Home sales in the US slumped in December, while prices inched up slightly, marking the smallest annual increase since the end of the last housing crash in 2012, according to data from brokerage Redfin. The median home price rose to $289,800 in December, a gain of 1.2 percent, the slowest monthly pace since March 2012. Sales dropped by almost ...

Bloomberg The German economy will have to lean on homegrown support to put the brakes on a slowdown after its worst performance in five years. Record-low unemployment, stronger wage gains and fiscal stimulus will underpin domestic demand after Europe’s growth engine stuttered in the second half of 2018, even though it avoided a recession. With export prospects deteriorating, those buffers ...

General Electric (GE) and Sears have fallen on hard times, and that tells us a lot about US capitalism. Both were once great enterprises — symbols of American ingenuity and imagination. The temptation will be to blame their troubles on mismanagement. The real lesson is starker. It is that no business, no matter how historically innovative or powerful, is guaranteed ...

Consumerism in post-1978 China has ridden five waves: from finding a solution to food shortages; to owning the “new big three” (refrigerator, colour TV and washing machine); spending more on information; buying automobiles; and finally, real estate. All the swells are now spent, according to Renmin University economist Xiang Songzuo. Using stimulus to reverse the first annual decline in car ...

For investors trying to take into account environmental, social and governance concerns, the best response seems to have been to adopt a version of St. Augustine’s prayer: “Oh Lord, make my strategy pure, but not too quickly.” For whenever the issue of socially responsible stock-picking arises, so too does the suspicion that doing good comes at a price. A study ...

“Defeat” is too small a word for the rebuke Britain’s Parliament handed Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday. Her Brexit deal, laboriously negotiated over many months, was voted down on Tuesday by a massive 230 votes — a far bigger margin than expected, and the worst loss of any British government in modern times. Yet if this brutal rejection has caused ...

At times of great global upheaval, policymakers often reach for familiar historical analogies to help them make sense of an uncertain future. Consider the debate over whether the deepening confrontation between the US and China constitutes a “new Cold War.” It is a marker of how quickly US-China relationship has deteriorated that commentators are invoking the analogy. Only three years ...

Germany is about to remind Facebook Inc. that the tribulations of 2018 are far from over. In fact, they’re about to get even more real. The country’s Federal Cartel Office intends to ban Facebook from collecting user data from third parties, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. This will also prohibit data sharing between WhatsApp and Instagram, which Facebook owns. ...

For people in the US, the American Dream is a vision of broadly shared prosperity, freedom and opportunity. Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream focuses on rising incomes and national renewal. Australians once had a simpler aspiration: owning a detached suburban home on a quarter-acre of land. That vision died a while ago. Back in the 1980s, single-family detached homes comprised about ...