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At Davos in January, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India was open for business and even likened protectionism to terrorism. This month his government raised tariffs on nearly 50 product groups, from clocks and kites to TV and auto components. The measures follow new duties imposed in December on electronic goods such as mobile phones and microwave ovens. The ...

Ahead of the Russian presidential election, President Vladimir Putin is keen to ensure that Russians’ real disposable incomes as measured by official statistics don’t decline. So the State Statistical Service has made sure of it. On February 19, the government agency reported that in January, the disposable income measure was unchanged from January, 2017. To produce that result, it had ...

When SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon Heavy blasted off on February 6, it became a global sensation. But a much quieter launch three days earlier may turn out to be more important. That’s when a 31-foot rocket known as the SS-520-5 took off from Japan’s Uchinoura Space Center. It’s the smallest rocket ever to place an object into Earth orbit — and ...

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel say they want to make the common currency area more resilient and adaptable, but their two countries have traditionally disagreed over how that should be achieved. Can crack economists from the relevant countries solve the problem for them? They are giving it a shot — but building a European consensus will ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve officials are showing surprise at just how much the recently-enacted tax cuts are boosting the US economy. But they’re still not impressed enough to lift estimates for long-term growth, a stance that puts them at odds with the White House. Minutes from the January 30-31 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee showed “a number” of policy ...

Bloomberg InvestaBank, the Mexican lender that agreed in 2016 to buy Deutsche Bank AG’s Mexico units, is considering steps to renegotiate the $175 million purchase, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The Mexico-based firm may seek to lower the price after regulatory changes wiped out most of the revenue the German lender generated through its monopoly on ...

Bloomberg The US agency responsible for insuring bank deposits sued more than a dozen of the world’s biggest lenders, accusing them of contributing to the collapse of Puerto Rico’s Doral Bank by manipulating the benchmark Libor interest rate. The collapse of San Juan-based Doral was the biggest US bank failure of 2015. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., its receiver in ...

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc pays its female staff on average 37 percent less than men at the bank, joining Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Standard Life Aberdeen Plc in revealing an acute gender imbalance between employees under new disclosure requirements. Women at RBS receive average bonuses that are 64 percent lower than male employees, the bank said ...

Bloomberg While Barclays Plc’s torrid 2017 ended on a mixed note, Jes Staley sees better things to come. Income from dealing stocks, bonds and currencies fell 18 percent, according to the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings report. That beat both the 26 percent decline estimated by UBS Group AG and the average 25 percent drop in markets revenue posted by Wall Street ...

NEW DELHI / Reuters Saudi Arabia hopes OPEC and its allies will be able to relax production curbs next year and create a permanent framework to stabilise oil markets after the current supply cut deal ends this year, its oil minister said on Saturday. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is reducing output by about 1.2 million barrels per ...