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Oil faces some new pressures and coal is on the outs. Those were two clear messages in the many energy investments and emissions strategies announced at the recent One Planet Summit in Paris: Consider, for example, these announcements. France’s AXA plans to divest 2.4 billion euros from coal and “completely divest from the oil sands industry and associated pipelines.” ING ...

It’s hard these days to muster much interest in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Locked for years in rounds of negotiations leading nowhere, the body seems to have outlived its usefulness. Another big gathering of trade ministers ended in deadlock in Buenos Aires last week. You might wonder: Why bother? The answer is that liberal trade, second only to capitalism, ...

In 2006 the Chinese government allowed Google to establish Google.cn for Chinese internet users. In return, Google agreed to scrub results of content that the government found objectionable. The deal held until 2010, when Google decided it could no longer agree to such terms. Within hours, the site was blocked and Google’s search business on the mainland was dead. The ...

Until now, the surge in cryptocurrency markets has been a sideshow to the financial markets or the real economy. Prices have gone up a lot for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it’s fun to joke about things with names like Cardano and Monero going up a lot in value, but if it were to all go up in smoke tomorrow, ...

There is plenty of talk about how social media, artificial intelligence and robots will change our world. Virtual reality has received less attention. Yet more than 1 million headsets were shipped in the third quarter of 2017, and increases in computing power and bandwidth may make this innovation “the next big thing.” As I see it, even if the early ...

Bloomberg An inflation rate that’s breached India’s target and growth that continues below potential will probably prompt the cen-tral bank to keep interest rates unchanged through the coming year. The benchmark repurchase rate will stay at 6 percent until at least the first quarter of 2019, according to most economists in a Bloomberg survey published this month. While swap markets ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s central bank formally ended a program of bond purchases after almost three years, but pledged support for the nation’s debt market into 2019 in a step designed to ensure a smooth retreat from record stimulus. In the Stockholm-based Riksbank’s last meeting of 2017, policy makers kept their key interest rate unchanged at minus 0.5 percent, as expected by ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is likely to ask Governor Haruh- iko Kuroda to lead the Bank of Japan for another five years, according to a Kuroda associate and BOJ adviser. “I expect Kuroda will continue to be governor,” Masahiro Kawai said in an interview. The chances are “very high” because both Abe and Finance Minister Taro Aso have expressed ...

Bloomberg Bangladesh is getting tough with the nation’s bankers as it attempts to avert a looming crisis caused by rising bad loans and weak capital ratios. The central bank said it ousted the chief executive officer of Farmers Bank, a small private-sector lender, accusing him of “gross irregularities in lending.” That followed the removal earlier in the month of the ...

Bloomberg Having subdued Australia’s housing market frenzy, Governor Philip Lowe now has to steer his way through the hangover. Despite being saddled with record household debt and wretched wages growth, Australia’s economy is showing signs of picking up steam, with hiring on a tear and firms investing. The dual narratives have prompted the central bank to sit still on record-low ...