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  Bloomberg Two years ago, BP Plc said international sanctions against Russia could hurt its business there. Didn’t happen. Instead, London-based BP has found a haven in Russia, buttressed by a falling ruble, lower taxes and the lowest operating costs among the world’s biggest oil companies. BP earned 22 percent of adjusted pretax profit from its share in Moscow-based OAO ...

  Bloomberg Some of the world’s top agricultural commodities traders say the era of slumping prices and low volatility isn’t over yet. Crop prices that slid in the past three years still aren’t low enough to encourage output cuts, Matt Jansen, the chief executive officer of trader Cofco Agri, said on Tuesday at the Financial Times Commodities Global Summit in ...

  Bloomberg Schlumberger Ltd. will reduce activity in Venezuela after the world’s largest oil services provider failed to collect enough payments from the national oil company. The reduction will take place this month in close coordination with all customers in Venezuela to continue servicing those with available cash flow, the Houston- and Paris-based contractor said in a statement Tuesday. Venezuela, ...

AP Businesses reduced their stockpiles for a second straight month in February, while sales fell for a seventh month. Business inventories dropped 0.1 percent, matching the decline in January, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday. Sales fell 0.4 percent in February after an even bigger 0.8 percent decline in January. Sales have been heading south since August. The weakness in ...

  Bloomberg A record $8 billion intervention by Brazil’s central bank couldn’t keep the real from climbing to the highest level since August amid bets that president Dilma Rousseff will be impeached. The central bank sold 160,000 foreign-exchange reverse swaps in five different auctions Tuesday, moves that are equivalent to buying dollars in the futures market. It was the biggest ...

  Bloomberg Amid the worst political crisis in decades, Brazil’s federal government also faces a spiraling state debt crisis that could cost it as much as $89 billion in lost revenue. Brazilian states, hit by a two-year recession that has depressed tax revenues, are seeking to apply simple rather than compound interest on debt owed to the federal government. The ...

There is a consensus that aggression by one nation against another is a serious matter, but there is no comparable consensus about what constitutes aggression. Waging aggressive war was one charge against Nazi leaders at the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials, but 70 years later it is unclear that aggression, properly understood, must involve war, as commonly understood. Or that ...

  The reports of consensus over oil output freeze following talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia and signs that global glut will ease in the US, saw the crude climbing to the highest level in more than four months on Tuesday. Speculations were already rife that the two oil majors had reached an agreement, boosting expectations that a wider deal ...

  Albert R. Hunt SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Donald Trump is getting some unlikely assistance from his opponents in his uphill effort to win a majority of Republican presidential delegates. Ted Cruz and John Kasich remain too busy battling each other to unite in opposition to the front-runner. Cruz and Kasich have the same goal: to prevent Trump from getting ...

  My recent column on the sixth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, generated some energetic criticism — or, rather, half a paragraph of it did. While I acknowledged that many Americans have benefited from the law, I also said that the Obama administration was too eager to give it credit for slowing the growth of ...