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  Berlin / AFP The German economy has shrugged off the shock election of Donald Trump as US president, with business confidence holding at a two-year high and consumption expected to rise in December. “The economic upturn in Germany remains intact. The German economy seems to be unfazed by the election of Donald Trump as US President,” said the Munich-based ...

  London / AFP Official forecasts that Brexit will blow a £59-billion hole in the British government’s budget drew fire from eurosceptics on Thursday, and even finance minister Philip Hammond said there was a “high degree of uncertainty” about the numbers. Former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith said the predictions from the government’s budget watchdog, the independent Office for Budget ...

  Barcelona / AFP Barcelona city hall said on Thursday it would fine home rental websites Airbnb and rival HomeAway 600,000 euros ($635,000) each for marketing lodgings that lacked permits to host tourists. The fine comes as the popular seaside resort struggles with a rising tide of tourism that has exasperated locals, threatening to drive out poorer residents and spoil ...

  History has a sly sense of humor. It caused an epiphany regarding infrastructure projects —roads, harbors, airports, etc. — to occur on a bridge over Boston’s Charles River, hard by Harvard Yard, where rarely is heard a discouraging word about government. Last spring, Larry Summers, former treasury secretary and Harvard president, was mired in congealed traffic on the bridge, ...

  The global populist revolution is widely seen as an existential threat to the European Union. The parties pushing it are mostly anti-EU, and after Brexit, more exits don’t look impossible. It’s probably wrong, however, to equate the strength of populist movements with anti-EU sentiment. Bertelsmann Stiftung, an organization that regularly measures attitudes toward the EU, has published the results ...

President-elect Donald Trump has already stepped back from his campaign pledge to entirely repeal Obamacare, saying he’ll keep a couple of the law’s popular insurance protections. Soon enough, certain governors in his own party can be expected to argue that it would also be smart to retain the law’s most successful component: the expansion of Medicaid. Trump should take that ...

  The UAE is giving huge impetus to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as the vital sector drives the economic engine of the country. At the recent 13th session of SME World Summit in New Delhi, the UAE representatives underlined that SMEs were the backbone of UAE’s economy. During the conference, the UAE stressed the need to promote partnerships that ...

  In less than two weeks, Italians will vote in a referendum on whether to change the nation’s constitution. Polls consistently suggest the government will lose the vote; even former Prime Minister Mario Monti told Bloomberg Television he’s voting “no.” And the bond market is signaling that there may be more at stake than just Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s job. ...

  If you’re not good at something, the smart thing to do is go find a professional. If you’re sick and don’t know what you have, you go to a doctor. If the wiring in your house has a short circuit, you call an electrician. But does this approach work in investing? Probably not. Doctors and electricians have to prove ...

    Justin Fox The vast majority of Americans will be sitting down to a gigantic, mostly home-cooked meal this Thursday. So this seems like as good a time as any to point out that such meals have become an anomaly. Basic ingredients — such as, you know, turkeys, cranberries and sweet potatoes —now account for only 5 percent of ...