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Bloomberg Canada’s unemployment rate fell back to four-decade lows, but sluggish wage increases and slumping exports offer little evidence the economy is running hot enough to warrant accelerated interest rate increases. Statistics Canada released jobs data that showed modest employment gains, but with a shrinking labour force and the slowest wage gains in a year. A separate trade report continued ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. was slapped with a symbolic 500,000-pound ($645,000) fine by the UK’s privacy regulator for “serious” violations of data protection rules that paved the way for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is the highest possible for the Information Commissioner’s Office under old rules that predated this year’s European Union revamp of privacy penalties. The ICO said that ...

Bloomberg Nokia Oyj said it will reap the rewards of higher spending on next-generation wireless networks in the final months of 2018, after the Finnish company announced an unspecified number of jobs reductions in a $1 billion drive to cut costs to reach long-term targets. The results showed that the company has some way to go to fulfill Chief Executive ...

How many jobs are vulnerable to automation? Plenty of people ask that question, and plenty of people try to give numerical answers. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that about 46 percent of jobs have a better-than-even chance of being automated. A 2016 study by Citigroup Inc. and the University of Oxford reported that ...

What’s so scary about climate change? The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films. How about “rat explosion”? As the climate ...

Exxon Mobil Corp. needed a good quarter, and it got a good quarter. It beat the consensus earnings estimate in the third quarter, having missed in the previous three. Sure, the margin of victory owed a bit to disposals and favorable tax treatment, but there were big underlying gains in both the upstream and downstream businesses. In particular, Exxon notched ...

Those who are awash in cash lack capital. Those who have adequate capital are thirsty for liquidity. That, in a nutshell, is the story of India’s financial crunch, and the surest way to ease it will require tapping Indians living overseas. In the past, New Delhi has resorted to such special hard-currency deposit programs to tide over balance-of-payment difficulties. A ...

Is central bank independence the next casualty of the age of populism? In the US, President Donald Trump has declared that the Federal Reserve is “going loco.” He blames Fed Chairman Jerome Powell for threatening “his” recovery and for market volatility caused in part by uncertainty over the trade war Trump himself started. In India, reports emerged this week that ...

Nomura Holdings Inc. will have to sharpen its focus and develop a more pronounced Japanese flavour overseas to move ahead. That means bulking up at home and cutting costs elsewhere. The 2016 profit recorded by Nomura’s international business is a distant memory after the securities firm shuttered much of its European stock trading. The company posted a rare quarterly loss ...

Facebook has faced so much criticism lately that it’s tempting to see its unexciting earnings release as another sign of trouble. More likely, however, the company is merely turning into an Apple lookalike, profiting from network effects rather than from disruptive innovation or any kind of residual positive vibe from its brand. It’s no accident that on the earnings call, ...