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China and the United States are presenting themselves as exemplars of opposite models of political governance. China has laid out its vision for a rejuvenated nation: a socialist planned economy, built on data and analytics, that will displace market economies. The US is taking the opposite route: withdrawing government from the marketplace, deregulating the economy through executive orders, starving regulators ...

Ironically, the city that should have been first to be swept up by China’s fintech revolution is still a picture of old-world conservatism. Not for long, though. Hong Kong, whose last big innovation in retail payments is as old as the former British colony’s 1997 handover to China, is on the cusp of big change. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s ...

Venture capital investor and longtime technology observer Mary Meeker has published her annual Internet Trends presentation — 294 slides this year, including a section on transportation. There’s a useful finding on slide 128: What Americans spend on purchasing vehicles has dropped since the 1970s, while spending on “other transportation,” including public transport and ride hailing, has nearly doubled. Bloomberg New ...

American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now. Given a multi-year decline in illegal immigration, and a similarly sustained pickup in the US job market, the complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers. Efforts to create a more straightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer ...

The economic policy proposals of Italy’s populist coalition have spooked the markets, which have driven up government debt yields. And yet the two coalition partners, League and the Five Star Movement, may be on to something with a proposal for a two-tier flat tax. Today, Italy has five income tax brackets with rates ranging from 23 percent to 43 percent. ...

Prepare for the great, but slow, unwinding of a Chinese leviathan. Anbang Insurance Group Co., the bailed-out owner of assets from New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel to Dutch insurer Vivat NV, is sending out mixed messages. The conglomerate hired bankers at UBS Group AG and China International Capital Corp. to advise on potential divestments, Bloomberg News reported; yet the government ...

Big trucks are all the rage in India, but Tata Motors Ltd.’s fortunes are still riding on a luxury marque that isn’t quite built for the subcontinent’s roads. Medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles have been the fastest-growing segment of India’s rapidly expanding auto market, with sales up more than 60 percent in May from a year earlier as transport companies ...

Bloomberg The global rally in risk assets that sent US stocks to a 12-week high sputtered on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 struggling to push higher. Treasuries rose while Italian bonds fell. Contracts for the S&P 500 had signalled the underlying gauge would extend gains following its highest finish since mid-March, but momentum faded as the open neared. After a ...

Bloomberg Crude declined after the US government was said to have asked Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers to raise oil supply. The request for a 1 million-barrel-a-day increase follows Washington’s decision to re-impose sanctions on Iranian crude exports that had removed roughly the same amount from global markets when restrictions were previously in place earlier this decade. OPEC pumped ...

Bloomberg The British government sold a 2.5 billion pound ($3.3 billion) stake in Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, reducing its majority holding a decade after it bailed out the lender during the financial crisis. The state sold 7.7 percent in the lender at 271 pence per share to institutional investors, it said in a statement on Tuesday. Shares in ...