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With moderate economic adviser Gary Cohn set to exit the White House, and US President Donald Trump reportedly mulling broad curbs on imports from China, fears of a 1930s-style trade war are spiking. Indeed, for the past several months, a potential US-China trade battle has ranked as one of the key macro investment risks of 2018. Given Trump’s predilections and ...

If it’s truly serious about cars, Apple Inc. should buy Aston Martin Holdings Ltd. This may sound wacky, but bear with me. For the prestige British carmaker, there’s clear mileage in the idea. Its owners are already planning an initial public offering and its CEO wants a “big brother” partner to help him keep pace with autonomous vehicle projects at ...

No one associates insurance with fireworks. The same goes for the preference share market. Mix them together, though, and the results are combustible — and will have far-reaching consequences. Aviva Plc this week lobbed a rocket at its preference shareholders. The UK insurer will consider cancelling its “irredeemable” preference shares and paying back investors at par value — about 450 ...

When President Donald Trump entered office, it was clear that policies boosting energy production would take precedence over those protecting the environment. The administration’s 2019 budget and its addendum proposed sweeping rollbacks to programs designed to limit environmental pollution and mitigate the effects of climate change, while slashing funds devoted to research on renewable energy. Yet despite this setback, these ...

My first graduate microeconomics class didn’t start with any grand theories or mathematical proofs. It started with a demonstration. The professor marched us down to a computer lab, divided us into groups of six, and had us participate in a simulated market. Amazingly, the price of the virtual commodity we were trading quickly converged to a single value and stayed ...

Banking regulators, and the lawmakers who set regulations, would make terrible comedians. Their timing is almost always way off. The most notorious example is the regulatory “streamlining” that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed in March 2008 after the financial crisis had essentially already started. But there are others, like the 2004 switch that allowed broker-dealers to pile up debt. There ...

Travis Kalanick, the Uber founder, has set up a fund to invest in companies involved in ‘large-scale job creation.’ That would seem to be right up his alley: Uber has created lots of jobs. The question, though, is whether they are the kind of jobs that benefit society or, in the final analysis, their holders. A recent academic argument advances ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. sees initial public offerings and M&A driving Middle East deals this year in what the US bank expects to be its busiest in the region. Private sector mergers and state sell-offs as part of privatisation plans will accelerate, while corporate bond sales are also likely to rise, Sjoerd Leenart, the bank’s global head of corporate ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG boosted Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti’s pay and increased the bank’s bonus pool by about 6 percent after underlying profit rose. The Zurich-based lender boosted the bonus pool for 2017 to 3.1 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion), according to its annual report. Ermotti remains the highest-paid executive, earning 14.2 million francs, up from the 13.7 million ...

Bloomberg Just because China’s financial regulators are cracking down on cryptocurrencies doesn’t mean they’re souring on the idea of digital money. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan made that clear at a press conference in Beijing, saying physical cash may one day become obsolete. Zhou said the PBOC is looking into digital currencies as it pursues faster, cheaper and ...