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Bloomberg US Supreme Court justices signalled they are divided about whether to let states start collecting billions of dollars in sales taxes from internet retailers that don’t currently charge tax to their customers. Hearing arguments in Washington in a South Dakota case, the justices considered overturning their 1992 ruling that made much of the inte-rnet a tax-free zone by exempting ...

Threatening tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump has provoked swift vows of retaliation from Beijing, shaken financial markets, and generated great uncertainty and confusion. Long before China started to run huge trade surpluses against the US, he ranted against American trade partners. Other countries, he claimed in 1999, “can’t believe how easy it is to deal with the ...

Bank of America Corp. (BofA) CEO Brian Moynihan pledged in his recent letter to shareholders to keep the bank on the path of “growing responsibly.” The question is whether keeping Bank of America straight has narrowed its profits too much. The first quarter appeared to support that. Bank of America said that its quarterly earnings per share rose nearly 38 ...

Sterling is back into its pre-Brexit referendum range versus the dollar, quite an amazing achievement from the depths of Brexit despair in late 2016. While dollar weakness has driven all the major currencies stronger, some of the fire under sterling has been driven by the Bank of England’s recent desire to raise rates. That desire, like many things in life, ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it expects the global economy to expand 3.9 percent this year and next, a forecast that is unchanged from January estimates. That’s the good news for markets. The bad news is that there was something much more important in the IMF report this quarter: caveats about risks related to protectionism and global conflict. Given ...

I recently returned from a trip to Japan. I’ve been going there for many years, so I can confirm that traveling in that country — especially for longer periods of time — is infinitely easier than it was just a decade ago. One of the main reasons is Airbnb. Ten years ago, lodging in Japan was limited to overpriced hotels ...

The food that people eat has become a major risk factor for disability and death worldwide. Yet countries and their philanthropic supporters seem not to be paying attention. They’re investing far too little in improving diets and preventing nutrition-related disease. The problem is part of a larger trend in human mortality. Until recently, in many low- and middle-income countries, malaria, ...

A lot of people these days think Facebook Inc. has become an incorrigible, toxic “regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance” under the near-absolute control of a “sovereign and singular ruler,” as University of North Carolina information scholar Zeynep Tufekci summed up in Wired a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure the harshest Facebook critics are right. I agree, though, ...

ABU DHABI / Reuters Abu Dhabi-based developer Aldar Properties plans more acquisitions as it sees opportunities in a slowing property market, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Late last year, Aldar bought an office tower in the emirate for AED658 million ($179 million). “We are seeing ample opportunities of new acquisitions in these market conditions in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere,” ...

DUBAI / WAM Emirates NBD announced that it has launched its own private cloud platform. It is the first bank in the region to implement a private cloud platform that leverages similar technologies to cloud-native companies, marking a major milestone in the Emirates NBD Group’s ongoing AED1 billion IT transformation. Through its new private cloud technology, the bank’s IT platforms ...