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India is an emerging market standout. The country was one of only a handful of large economies marked down in forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week. India’s GDP is expected to rise 6.7% this year, compared with a previous projection of 7.2%. Next year’s estimate was also lowered. Midway through their term, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ...

The state of the union is strong in China. The nation not only holds $1.1 trillion of US debt, it’s also able to issue bonds, in dollars, at the same price as Treasuries. The Ministry of Finance announcement this week that it plans to sell $2 billion of dollar bonds marks China’s first offering in that currency since 2004. The ...

The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan was never the best way to lower US greenhouse-gas emissions. A national tax on carbon dioxide emissions would have been far simpler and more effective. By making sure that all fuels are priced to account for their effects on climate, it would have let the market find the most efficient ways to cut emissions. ...

By accepting an upper limit to the number of immigrants Germany will accept for humanitarian reasons, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made one of her trademark compromises: no one is happy, but her solution will work well enough for now. Forming a governing coalition in the next few months will require a few more of these. Merkel and Bavarian prime minister ...

Oil prices have been subject to big swings this year. Since June, though, fundamental demand factors have been supportive, and with global economic growth firming, the outlook for oil is bright. The significant — and surprising — midyear crude oil price selloff was triggered at the beginning of June by China’s Caixin PMI for May, which showed a contraction in ...

Judging from General Motors Co.’s test cars and Elon Musk’s predictions, the world is headed toward a future that’s both driverless and all-electric. In reality, autonomy and battery power could end up being at odds. That’s because self-driving technology is a huge power drain. Some of today’s prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity—the equivalent ...

Bloomberg The guardians of the world economy brushed aside soaring stock and asset prices as a threat to economic and financial stability even as some bankers warned that investors risk repeating their pre-crisis complacency. The rare turnabout in which central bankers and finance ministers expressed comfort with the level of markets—even as private-sector executives urged caution—took place in and around ...

Reuters Most Middle East stock markets traded in narrow ranges on Sunday while Saudi Arabia was dragged down by several major blue chips. The Saudi index dropped 0.7 percent as Al Rajhi Bank lost 1.0 percent and miner Ma’aden sank 1.9 percent. Petrochemical producer Saudi Basic Industries fell 0.7 percent. Insurers were roughly evenly split between gainers and losers after ...

Bloomberg With the European Central Bank’s (ECB) next policy update less than two weeks away, the institution’s chief is expressing both confidence and patience about achieving its inflation goal. “We are confident that as the conditions will continue to improve, the inflation rate will gradually converge in a self-sustained manner, as we’ve defined many times, and in a durable way ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s central bank may raise the maximum loan-to-deposit ratio for commercial banks if that is needed to help the economy, central bank governor Ahmed al-Kholifey told Al Arabiya television. Kholifey was speaking on the sidelines of meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington. The central bank last raised the ratio in February 2016, to ...