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Bloomberg Four years ago, General Electric Co made a commitment to win France’s approval to buy Alstom SA’s energy business: it would create jobs or pay a hefty fine. The Boston-based company pledged it would add 1,000 positions in France by end-2018, failing which it would pay the French government a fine of 50,000 euros ($57,000) for every job not ...

Bloomberg Strong processing profits probably kept cocoa processing at high rates in Europe and Nor-th America, according to a Bloomberg survey. Grinding in Europe, the top-consuming region, likely rose 2 percent in the fourth quarter to the highest for that period going back to 2001, the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 14 traders, brokers, processors and analysts showed. ...

At home and abroad, people are now asking a question they’ve dreaded for nearly two years: How will the erratic presidency of Donald Trump function without the steadying hand of Jim Mattis as defense secretary? Life without Mattis is the scary reality of this new year. The president may have tired of the careful, battle-hardened advice he received from the ...

Jaguar Land Rover’s job cuts will do little for its turnaround plans. The UK luxury unit of India’s Tata Motors Ltd. will eliminate 4,500 positions globally as part of a $3.2 billion cost-cutting program outlined in November. The savings will be relatively minor. Workforce reductions are now standard in an industry struggling to deal with rising costs from technology, pricier ...

Investors waiting for 5G to boost Xiaomi Corp.’s fortunes might as well take their money elsewhere. Founder and CEO Lei Jun told Bloomberg News that he expects the advent of next-generation wireless to energize demand for its smartphones: We are at the eve of 5G and when 5G phones start to get popular, the overall demand from China will recover. ...

The latest data on Germany’s economy is surprisingly grim. Industrial production fell sharply in November, and the country is on the brink of a technical recession. Its government should get ready to loosen fiscal policy if output doesn’t bounce back soon. November’s 1.9 percent month-on-month decline in industrial production followed a 0.8 percent drop in October. The economy’s overall output ...

Instead of blaming the central bank at every opportunity for its poor stewardship of the economy, India’s finance ministry should reflect on its own record, especially its five failures of fiscal policy in almost as many years. The most obvious is the goods and services tax. A month after the levy went into effect in July 2017, a little over ...

Both companies and the fund managers that invest in them are under pressure to pay more attention to environmental, social and governance issues. For the former group, that requires delivering increased transparency on an ever-expanding range of metrics. For the investment crowd, tailoring strategies to address the new demands means increased spending on data — at a time when fees ...

Apple’s reported plans to cut iPhone production by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2019 make increasingly clear that the company’s base of loyal users isn’t an inexhaustible resource from whom it can forever extract a rent through its services offerings. Apple needs to compete more vigorously in all the other markets in which it’s present, without relying on ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc offered some hope that the worst is over for its bond-trading business after the toughest quarter for that unit in seven years. The lender’s shares jumped almost 4 percent, the most in the S&P 500 Index, after Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said the trading environment was starting to improve this month. The brighter outlook came after ...