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  Bloomberg Rallies in the pound are proving tough to sustain as recent opinion polls puncture investor confidence that the U.K. will choose to remain in the European Union in the June 23 referendum. Sterling rose versus the dollar on Thursday after dropping the previous two days as surveys released this week signaled the ‘Leave’ camp pulling ahead of the ...

  Netherlands / AFP US delivery giant FedEx now owns over 98 percent of Dutch rival TNT, the two companies announced on Thursday as they move to complete a key $4.4 billion tie-up after winning EU approval. The deal unveiled in April 2015 came two years after the European Commission, the European Union’s powerful executive arm, had torpedoed a bid ...

  Bloomberg Swedbank AB, which is doing more corporate bond issues in the Nordic region this year than any other bank, says the share of Swedish companies’ debt market funding will more than double as higher capital requirements make bank loans more expensive. About 15 percent of corporate funding in the Nordic region now comes from the capital markets, Elisabeth ...

  Switzerland / AFP Carole, a scientist from Zurich, recently received a dream message on her phone: she will receive 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,500, €2,300) a month for the next year, no strings attached. The 30-year-old ethnologist, whose last name has not been revealed, could be the first of many in Switzerland to receive such monthly cheques in the mail. ...

LONDON Sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of the House of Lords, watching the Thames flow, Lord Nigel Lawson explains that the June 23 referendum, which he hopes will withdraw Britain from the European Union, was never supposed to happen. It is, he says, the fulfillment of a promise Prime Minister David Cameron expected to be prevented from keeping. Going into ...

  2015 saw record worldwide investment and implementation of clean energy such as wind, solar and hydropower. This might have been driven by strategic sustainable development plans that aim to reduce dependence on fossil energy, with an ultimate goal set on the reduction of CO2 emissions. Prompted by environment awareness and sustainability plans, many countries have started to opt for ...

  John Brandon SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Get ready to take some Tylenol VR, folks. We might need that (totally made-up) medication someday if a Forrester prediction comes to fruition. Analysts are saying there could be as many as 52 million headsets sold by 2020, made up mostly of the recently released HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. The Forrester ...

  Earlier this month Greece’s government announced the formation of a privatization “superfund” to sell off state-owned assets, including the Greek railways, postal service and a number of utilities. Its scope – the sale of 50 billion euros in state assets – comes a close second in scale to the privatizations of the 1980s in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. The ...

  Bloomberg Canadian bankers are calling on the government to take further steps to cool surging housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver. The heads of National Bank of Canada and Bank of Nova Scotia said mortgage down-payment requirements should be boosted to tame the market, joining the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which said on Wednesday measures should be ...

  Bloomberg Australia’s Victoria state is “very confident” the winning bid for a 50-year lease to operate the Port of Melbourne, which is valued at between $4 billion and $6 billion, will exceed the book price, state Premier Daniel Andrews said. “All the market expectation, all the commentators talk about us exceeding the price that we’ve booked, and we are ...