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Bloomberg Dairy producer Yakult Honsha Co. is finding that the power of product placement is so potent it works even when it’s mistaken. Viewers of Netflix’s new romantic comedy, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,’’ have noticed the main character’s sister drinking a yogurt out of a distinctive little bottle, and are talking about it on Twitter, according to ...

If President Donald Trump’s pronouncements are to be believed, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the US, Canada and Mexico will soon be replaced by a bilateral US-Mexico trade agreement, presumably with a US-Canada agreement to follow. The actual changes to US-Mexico trade rules don’t look very substantial. The new agreement essentially implements a partial minimum wage for ...

The difficulties for emerging markets have entered a new phase. What were once clearly country-specific crises, well contained within their borders, are bleeding across the world. To stem the slide in its currency Argentina raised its key rate to a whopping 60 percent last week, but the peso was still 30 percent weaker. Though Turkey is no closer to solving ...

Donald Trump is the most powerful person in the world, and he has a loud megaphone. One word or tweet from him can move markets, or galvanize rage against a person or institution. Yet Amazon.com Inc. stayed quiet when the US president said the company crushes small businesses, may be violating anti-monopoly laws, dodges taxes and takes advantage of the ...

The next round of US tariffs on Chinese imports — $200 billion worth — could come as soon as this week, after talks to avert them ended without resolution. China is set to retaliate promptly with duties on nearly everything it imports from the United States. Even as he signaled an initial deal with Mexico, President Donald Trump declared it ...

From debt vultures and cooked books to fiscal time bombs, Argentine President Mauricio Macri inherited quite the mess. In his three years of office, he’s handled most of these challenges remarkably well, drawing cheers from investors and his compatriots. Here was a decisive, business-friendly manager, talking transparency and free-market initiatives to end what might have been “the largest populist experiment” ...

This week, California’s state legislature approved a bill requiring the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by the year 2045. It’s a landmark for power sector decarbonization, and if Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill, it will require a transformation of the state’s energy system. California already gets 29 percent of its electricity from zero-carbon ...

The Indian central bank’s final tally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2016 demonetization drive, intended to take money derived from tax evasion out of circulation, showed that 99.3 percent of outlawed high-value banknotes had been returned. That’s a severe loss of face for officials, who had argued that holders of the cash would rather destroy it than return it to ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s Lesetja Kganyago has a fight on his hands to protect the central bank’s $50 billion of reserves. More than eight months after the ruling African National Congress decided that the South African Reserve Bank should be state-owned, like most other central banks, the governor said his main concern remains to protect the regulator’s independence and mandate. But ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG will introduce a new electronic currency pricing and trading engine in Singapore next year in a bid to boost liquidity in Asia’s largest foreign-exchange center. The facility will go live in the second quarter of 2019, Zurich-based UBS said in an emailed statement. The bank is undertaking the initiative in partnership with the Monetary Authority of ...