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Bloomberg An anticipated pickup in UK inflation failed to materialise last month as food, clothing and transport prices declined. Annual consumer-price growth stayed at 2.4 percent in October, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The figure is below the 2.5 percent predicted by both the Bank of England and economists in a Bloomberg survey. Food and non-alcoholic drink ...

The US-China trade war is looking more and more like a cold war. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, crackdown on alleged Chinese theft of American technology, and rhetoric have overturned decades of US foreign policy that had prioritised cooperation. Meanwhile, his counterpart Xi Jinping hasn’t budged on any concessions. China experts worry that relations between the world’s two most important countries ...

Italy has managed to scrape by with its 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) monthly auction of three, seven and 20-year government bonds on Tuesday. It has now completed nearly 95 percent of its annual funding target, but that’s where the good news ends. It is still visibly struggling to place longer-dated paper. Benchmark 10-year yields stayed high, even after the ...

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been lucky, so far. His country looks to have come out of this year’s emerging-markets rout largely unscathed. The ringgit has fallen only 3.4 percent against the dollar, while the MSCI Malaysia Index has dipped a mere 5.9 percent, compared with a 16 percent slump for the broader emerging-markets gauge. Beneath the calm is ...

A three minute conversation on stage at UBS AG’s Global Technology Conference in San Francisco helped wipe more than $190 billion from global stocks. Lumentum Holdings Inc. makes lasers for 3D facial recognition used by major smartphone makers, with Apple Inc. its key client. On Monday, the company announced a 17 percent cut in its December-quarter revenue outlook. That triggered ...

In India, crises move slowly. We’ve known for years that the state-controlled banks that dominate the financial sector were groaning under the weight of bad loans. For years, though, the government successfully kicked the can down the road. All those assets haven’t been accounted for yet, the banks haven’t been fully recapitalised, the bankruptcy process isn’t working to schedule, yet ...

Chinese regulators have stepped back from imposing hard-and-fast rules on how much banks must lend to the cash-starved private sector. Their exhortation isn’t going away, though, and that means investors in shares of lenders should prepare for more pain. Authorities will refrain from imposing specific targets for each bank and are urging firms to conduct appropriate due diligence, according to ...

Never before has one company’s failure had such a devastating effect on the world, wrote the technology journalist David Kirkpatrick. He continued: Racists, autocrats, and purveyors of hate and disorder have found Facebook the perfect medium for spewing poison, normalising it, and gaining adherents. … Societies around the world are reeling from the consequences. Politics and democracy are under duress. ...

Bloomberg US stocks pared an advance after a key Democrat called into question the revamped Nafta deal, rekindling concern over trade. Crude rebounded from the worst rout in three years. The S&P 500 looked for its first gain in five sessions, while technology shares all but erased a rise that topped 1 percent. Bill Pascrell, in line to chair the ...

Bloomberg Volatility in the pound jumped as traders looked ahead to the next hurdle on the Brexit path even if a draft deal is signed off by Prime Minister Theresa May’s senior ministers. Overnight volatility in the pound against the dollar climbed to the highest level in more than a year. One-, two- and three-month measures also rose, suggesting that ...