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Bloomberg The Catalan independence movement is divided over how to move forward as opinion polls suggest the December regional election is too close to call. While ousted President Carles Puigdemont doubled down this weekend on his pledge to make the wealthy region an independent state, his former ally Esquerra Republicana suggested the party should focus on policy instead. The clash ...

Bloomberg Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who won a new five-year term last year, said it’s time for him to step aside and let the Kremlin choose a successor. A Russian official downplayed the statement as an emotional message meant to show he’s not clinging to power, the Interfax news service reported. “There was a time when people like me were ...

By the middle of the century, nuclear-powered Chinese shuttles will regularly ply interplanetary space, carrying workers between mining colonies on distant planets and asteroids. If that, like much else published on the front page of the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, sounds like propaganda, remember that China has in barely two decades built up what’s arguably ...

It took just 24 hours for politics and optics to trump economics and common sense. Recently, I suggested that India was striking the right balance by preventing only “wilful” defaulters from bidding for their own assets in bankruptcies. Since with most of the country’s $207 billion of impaired loans, there’s no proof of malfeasance by the controlling shareholders—or promoters as ...

Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing the right alternative commodity-linked currency to pay for their groceries. First we got the Bitcoin Visa card, the perfect gift for those who want an easy way spend a cryptocurrency that has gained 800 percent this year on goods whose price is up a relatively mild 3 percent. Swipe the ...

South Korea’s corporate watchdog is going after charities that the nation’s family dynasties may have been using to skirt power-diluting inheritance taxes and maintain control, according to a Bloomberg News report. That’s a smart move, but an incomplete one. For the crackdown on the $12 billion in foundation money held by chaebol including Samsung Group and Hyundai Motor Group to ...

After years of crisis management, heightened self-doubt and even existential threats, Europe is in a much better place. Economic growth is picking up, political uncertainty has diminished and, despite (if not partially because of) Brexit, the vision of an “ever-closer” regional union is energizing some new constructive thinking in core countries. Translating this into sustainable prosperity, however, is far from ...

Lee Shau Kee, the billionaire chairman of Henderson Land Development Co., has said he will donate HK$1 billion ($128 million) to charity each year that the Hang Seng Index stays above 30,000, and double that if it reaches 40,000. The 89-year-old should be prepared to hand out the cash. Sure, Hong Kong’s benchmark gauge closed above 30,000 on only one ...

Should central banks embrace cryptocurrencies, or even pioneer their own? In a nutshell, no. Crypto assets are an unusual innovation, still in flux and often poorly understood. Trying to centralize them in a bureaucracy is exactly the wrong way to go. Yet China’s central bank claims it is working towards a blockchain-based digital currency. Singapore has already experimented in this ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is sticking to the substance of its plan to toughen bad-loan rules for euro-area banks even as it makes some adjustments in response to a barrage of criticism from Rome and Brussels, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The ECB was accused of overreach in its recent proposal to hold banks to firm ...