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Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s parliamentary caucus pressed her to end a cabinet standoff over refugee policy, underscoring the unbroken political risk posed by migration. At a regular meeting of Merkel’s 246-member Christian Democratic-led bloc on Tuesday, no member backed the chancellor’s criticism of a proposal by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to turn back refugees at the German border, according ...

Bloomberg Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila isn’t planning to seek another term in an election scheduled for December as his opponents have speculated, the country’s prime minister said. While the constitution bars Kabila from seeking a third term, he’s refused publicly to rule himself out as a candidate in a vote scheduled for December 23. Attempting to extend ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s attorney general will start his review of 1MDB investigation papers, signaling that charges linked to the troubled state fund may be imminent. Attorney-General Tommy Thomas has formed two teams, one to study the documents for possible criminal prosecution, and the other for civil proceedings, he said. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission submitted the files to the Attorney General’s Chambers ...

No one really knows how to predict recessions. Despite the massive financial returns that would accrue to anyone who had a good way of spotting downturns before they happen, macroeconomic forecasters are unable to do this with any reliability. And if professional forecasters can’t succeed in the high-stakes world of the financial industry, the chances of a pundit such as ...

Facebook insists that people can trust it to manage its giant social network in a way that doesn’t undermine democracy. I say verify: Let’s send in an army of scientists to study its role in the upcoming 2018 elections. There’s been too little research into how Facebook influenced the last election, even though there’s plenty of reason to think it ...

The UK government has all but approved Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take full control of Sky Plc. That’s good news for the satellite broadcaster’s shareholders. It’s also a sign that even the most controversial foreign offers for British companies have a fighting chance of success. UK Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said he will clear the bid by Murdoch’s 21st Century ...

America is easing open the gates for Chinese acquirers. A key (and opaque) US national security panel gave a real estate firm the all-clear to purchase Genworth Financial Inc., an insurer specializing in long-term care, after the Beijing-based company gave assurances on data privacy. The weekend nod from the Com­mit­tee on For­eign In­vest­ment in the US for China Oceanwide Holdings ...

One reason the US and China can’t figure out how to negotiate on trade may be that the Americans are making two sets of demands that are antithetical to each other, without even realizing it. On one side are threatened sanctions targeting the Made in China 2025 program of technology development and those against ZTE Corp. The headline tariffs, sometimes ...

It’s time the cryptocurrency community got its act together. In this relatively new industry, hacks and frauds have been greeted with a shrug and largely dismissed as part of the process of building a superior financial system. True believers are convinced that Bitcoin and its siblings will overthrow fiat currencies and the existing structures to which they’re attached. At their ...

The meetings of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) this week are likely to show that these systemically important institutions continue to gradually move away from the policy approach they adopted to contain the trauma of the global financial crisis from 2010 to 2017. Yet the two institutions are making this shift at different speeds, and that ...