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  Sign up to receive the Brexit Bulletin in your inbox, and follow @Brexit on Twitter. Theresa May was keen to stress on Monday she doesn’t ‘accept the terms hard and soft Brexit.’ Investors may need to move beyond them too, after spending much of 2016 trying to guess if the prime minister would go hard (by focusing on controlling ...

  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s push further into bricks and mortar may be just in time. The Chinese e-commerce giant is leading a bid to take department store operator Intime Retail Group Co. private, according to a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange. Alibaba and Intime’s founder Shen Guojun will pay HK$10 ($1.30) for the Intime shares they don’t ...

  Another holiday shopping season has passed, and though the rapid growth of online spending has been a well-told story for a number of years now, it’s worth highlighting the latest developments and what they mean for investors. Internet sales rose an estimated 15 percent, to 19 percent, from a year earlier, while those at traditional stores fell 10 percent ...

  Bloomberg Asian stocks extended gains to an 11-week high as metal producers surged. Japanese equities rose as the yen halted its advance against the greenback ahead of US President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference since July. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose for a third day, adding 0.4 percent as of 4:57 p.m. in Hong Kong and set for ...

  DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s stock market declined for a fourth straight day on on Wednesday after oil prices fell further, but other Gulf bourses largely moved sideways and Dubai held near a 15-month high. The Saudi index pulled back 1.6 percent to 6,895 points, falling below technical support at the mid-December low of 7,002 points. Another straight close ...

  Bloomberg Azerbaijan will transfer as much as 7.5 billion manat ($4 billion) of assets from its sovereign wealth fund to the central bank this year, giving it ammunition to defend the manat in the latest effort to break the grip of a currency crisis. The regulator will use the money to ‘ensure macroeconomic stability’ in 2017, according to a ...

  Bloomberg Canadian banks started their 2017 funding programs by selling a record amount of bonds backed by residential mortgages abroad, taking advantage of lower borrowing costs amid demand for their top-rated debt. The country’s biggest financial institutions have sold about $6 billion in covered bonds denominated in euros, US dollars and pounds this year, the most on record for ...

  Reuters Qatar’s Masraf Al Rayan, an Islamic lender, has mandated banks for a sukuk of around $500 million, banking sources said on Wednesday. This would be one of a likely series of debt issues in the first quarter by Gulf banks seeking US dollar funding to improve their liquidity, which has been hurt by low oil prices. Abu Dhabi ...

  Bloomberg The Turkish central bank’s thinly veiled pledge to take action to stem the lira’s bought only a short reprieve before the slump continued. By just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday in Istanbul, the lira was trading down 1.7 percent against the dollar — weaker than its level prior to the central bank’s statement about an hour earlier and ...

  Dresden / DPA When his royal palace in Dresden was badly damaged by fire in 1701, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland seized his chance: Out with the original romanesque architecture and in with a glamourous new-fangled style: baroque. Over the next three decades, August II (1670-1733) oversaw a major refurbishing of the Dresden Royal Palace, creating ...