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Bloomberg A regular client of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), investors are asking whether Pakistan’s 13th loan program since the late 1980s will finally break a cycle of financial crashes and bailouts. Pakistan’s history of taking the lender’s money while dragging its heels on economic reforms suggest otherwise. With Islamabad now formally requesting IMF aid — seeking to raise anywhere ...

Bloomberg The UK Treasury is planning new measures to encourage investment in machinery and factories to help revive Britain’s flagging productivity, two officials familiar with the matter said. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond may use the budget on October 29 to announce the measures, with tax breaks under active consideration, according to the officials, who declined to be named ...

Bloomberg US authorities have opened investigations into whether shares in Broadcom Inc. and CA Technologies Inc. were the target of a stock-manipulation scheme, according to people familiar with the matter. The inquires are related to Broadcom’s announcement that lawmakers were given what purported to be a US Defense Department assessment of national-security concerns surrounding Broadcom’s planned purchase of CA. That ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. said intimate information, including search results, recent locations and hometowns, were stolen from 14 million users by attackers in a major hack of the social network disclosed two weeks ago. The company said the cyber-attack, one of the worst to hit Facebook, affected 30 million people rather than about 50 million the company first reported September 28. ...

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp.’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella called for national privacy legislation, days after Google became the latest tech giant to reveal a security flaw, potentially exposing personal data. “We hope that there’s more of a national privacy law,” Nadella said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he discussed leadership ...

Bloomberg A gauge of underlying US inflation was below estimates in September as used-car costs fell and housing rents cooled, signalling that price gains may remain close to where Federal Reserve policy makers want them amid an outlook for continued gradual interest-rate hikes. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, the core consumer price index rose 2.2 percent in September from ...

China just dealt a blow to the global luxury goods industry. You can blame the trade war for that. The crackdown on the daigou trade – in which tourists, friends and relatives buy high-value products overseas and send them back into the country to avoid China’s hefty sales and import taxes – has sent shares in luxury houses tumbling. After ...

Spare a thought for Italian banks if you can. Barely recovered from their recent crisis, the country’s lenders find they have stumbled into a new one. Rome’s populist administration has sent yields on government bonds soaring by passing a budget that busts the EU’s fiscal rules. And since Italian banks still hold hefty amounts of those bonds, investors have taken ...

Wall Street’s powerhouses are beginning to lose some power. JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off third-quarter earnings for the big banks on Friday, and while the results were better than expected, they showed a lack of energy in key division: investment banking. Revenue from fixed-income trading was down 10 percent, which was worse than analysts were expecting. Fees from equity ...

President Donald Trump once pledged to replace Obamacare with a system that would provide good health insurance for all Americans. His failure to devise such a plan became obvious during his first year in office, as he and the Republican Congress tried in vain to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Various alternatives were floated that would have only increased the ...