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  Bloomberg Regulators are notorious for falling behind the financial industry, cracking down on risk in one area only to watch it move swiftly beyond their reach. This phenomenon has rearranged the competitive landscape in the nearly $1 trillion market for US leveraged loans. This week, Bloomberg News highlighted how private-equity firms have been winning a growing number of assignments ...

  Bloomberg As the Bundesbank turns 60 this year, it might have a message for the teenage European Central Bank: we’ve been there before. While the two Frankfurt-based institutions haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, the ties between them run deep. The ECB was deliberately infused with the spirit, and some of the staff, of the German central bank when it was ...

  Bloomberg The tightening of emissions limits for deep-water ships has some of North America’s busiest ports chasing a new opportunity. The UN’s International Maritime Organization last year cut limits on sulfur in marine fuels to 0.5 percent from 3.5 percent, starting in 2020. The target: So-called bunker fuel, a cheap, tar-like oil residue used by most ships. Now ports ...

  Bloomberg Saudi Arabia’s Almarai, the Gulf’s largest dairy company, reported a 1 percent increase in fourth-quarter net profit on Sunday, broadly in line with analysts’ forecasts, and said cost controls would continue to be a priority. Almarai said net profit totalled 488.5 million riyals ($130 million) in the three months to Dec. 31, up from 483.7 million riyals in ...

  Bloomberg Global investments in renewable power dropped the most on record in 2016 as demand in China and Japan faltered. Worldwide spending on clean energy fell 18 percent from 2015’s record high to $287.5 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. It was the first decline since 2013 and comes as environmental policies face pressure from ...

  Bloomberg German utilities from RWE AG to EON SE may struggle to convince investors they can adapt to the renewable energy revolution even after the industry’s unprecedented shakeup in 2016. Headwinds range from a power price rally that’s forecast to fade this year to a multi billion-euro nuclear clean-up bill. While planned spending curbs and thousands of job cuts ...

  Bloomberg Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s disruptive cash ban is unlikely to damage his party’s performance in upcoming state polls. In fact, it might even help. Modi’s move to invalidate 86 percent of circulated currency in Asia’s third-largest economy forced millions of Indians into lengthy bank queues. It has also dented India’s world-beating growth as the country’s cash-dependent economy ...

  Bloomberg China’s recent push to clean up its air is leaving some of its neighbours feeling threatened. The Asian country’s road to cleaner air has been gradual, with lead-free gasoline only becoming a requirement in 2000, almost three decades behind the US. This month, China imposed new curbs on the amount of sulfur in vehicle fuels to about a ...

  BOGOR / AP Japan and Indonesia affirmed a deepening of economic and political ties during a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is using a four-nation tour of Asia to underscore his government’s role in countering China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea. After meeting with Abe, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said the increase in Japanese ...

  Bloomberg The people who make some of Switzerland’s most expensive watches have a word of advice for the rest of the industry: Slow down. That might help avoid a repeat of the last two years, when watchmakers had to cut jobs and repurchase inventory after their rush into the Chinese market hit a wall. As more than two dozen ...