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Bloomberg German business confidence unexpectedly weakened in December, while remaining close to its record, in a sign of nerves over the outlook for Europe’s largest economy. The Ifo Institute’s gauge of business sentiment declined to 117.2 from a revised 117.6 the previous month. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg predicted a reading of 117.5, matching November’s original number. Ifo’s gauge remains near ...

Bloomberg It’s quite a cocktail: throw in some profit-seeking techies, mix in the age-old Roman Catholic Church and add a twist of anti-globalism. What you get is a startup hub. A year ago, venture capitalists Stephen Forte of Fresco Capital Fund and Eric Harr of Imagine Ventures—both based in California— asked the Vatican to back a technology competition among startups ...

When you read words like ‘output,’ ‘economic growth’ or ‘national income,’ you’re almost always reading about gross domestic product. This measure, more than any other, has come to be equated with national prosperity and living standards. We use it to compare countries with each other, and also to compare the present with the past. But GDP misses many important things. ...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai can count the early success of Tez, the online payment system he custom-built for India, as a promising start to a gruelling fight. The first click in online shopping is shifting away from search engines like Alphabet Inc.’s Google to e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com Inc. But Google isn’t bowing out. Even with more product searches beginning within ...

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is doubling down on retail. Investors shouldn’t act so surprised. Days after confirming plans to pay around 4.2 billion yuan ($635 million) for a 5 percent stake in Yonghui Superstores Co., the Chinese social-media king announced it would outlay a similar amount for a similar stake in Vipshop Holdings Ltd. Yonghui operates a chain of supermarkets, Vipshop ...

The net neutrality war rages on. Last week Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, dismantled rules the Barack Obama administration put in place in 2015 requiring internet service providers to treat all internet traffic the same. Supporters are elated, and opponents are rending their garments: Presumably, then, the decision is of vast significance. Actually, it’s hard to say ...

What do German dentists and architects have in common with Yorkshire council workers? Bizarrely, they’re all part-owners of Airbus A380s. Airbus SE is struggling to sell the A380 and a second-hand market hasn’t become established yet. But Airbus isn’t the only one facing a problem: German retail investors and British pension funds have savings tied up in alternative investment vehicles ...

For a central banker, nothing beats a (non) decision on interest rates as a way to bury some bad news. Amid the excitement of last week’s meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB), the regulator slipped out some unwelcome changes to its rule-book: banks will no longer be able to use some senior unsecured bonds as collateral when getting funding ...

Ever since the financial crisis, the European Union has grappled with how to solve the so-called sovereign bank doom loop — the phenomenon whereby weak banks can destabilize governments that support them and over-indebted governments can push banks holding their bonds over the precipice. The widely touted solution is the European Banking Union, which the European Commission wants completed by ...

Bloomberg Central bankers around the world have set up or are creating departments to embrace big data in the quest for deeper insight into the economies they manage. “Isaac Asimov once said, ‘I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them,’” David Hardoon, chief data officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said in a recent speech. “We ...