A new US law that includes about $52 billion to boost domestic semiconductor production and research could unlock as much as $400 billion in investment, President Joe Biden’s commerce chief said. 

“Our goal is to maximize it,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “It is an amount that we hope is enough to unlock two, three, $400 billion on behalf of private industry.”

Kim Jong Un’s influential sister vowed to “eradicate” South Korea’s leaders if they continued to let propaganda leaflets cross the border, repeating dubious claims that pamphlets caused the recent Covid outbreak in the north. 

Kim Yo Jong blamed “South Korean puppets” for sending “dirty objects” across the border in leaflets carried by balloons, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday. The younger Kim also disclosed that her brother was stricken by “high fever” during the outbreak, in an unusual admission for a regime that rarely comments on the leader’s health. 

The latest consumer-price gains data from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand surprised on the upside, signaling that cost pressures continue to outrun market forecasts. Shorter-dated yields, which are more sensitive to hawkish rate expectations, remain elevated as investors appear unconvinced that inflation has topped out for now. 

While JPMorgan Chase & Co. is urging investors to use an “unsustainable” rally in emerging-market bonds to ditch debt from some of the riskiest corners of the world, Morgan Stanley is recommending they pile up on it. 

A lower-than-expected US inflation reading released Wednesday should support developing-nation bonds, Morgan Stanley strategists led by Simon Waever wrote in a note, turning bullish on sovereign credit for the first time since November 2020. Just a day before, JPMorgan strategists led by Trang Nguyen said the recent rebound in the asset class won’t last long, suggesting clients dump less liquid names at opportunistic prices and buy cheaper hedges to protect against selloffs. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan has made geopolitics with China “particularly complicated” as President Joe Biden weighs the future of tariffs on more than $300 billion in goods from the US rival, according to his commerce chief.

“Certainly, it has made it a little more challenging,” Gina Raimondo said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power With David Westin” on Wednesday. “It’s harder, but I am hopeful that we will get beyond that and get back to a place where we can have more of those discussions.”  

Carol Chow isn’t your typical Hong Kong real estate developer.

Raised in a Kowloon public housing project, the 39-year-old comes from a different world than the city’s billionaire property clans. Yet in just a decade, she has built a company from scratch that’s quickly found its own niche in the market.

A Las Vegas bartender coping with a recent cancer diagnosis is fearing eviction. A young professional in Tucson is skipping car payments to afford her higher rent. A researcher in Miami signed the lease for her new apartment sight unseen. 

Rental costs in the US are soaring at the

Pegged to the U.S. dollar since 1983, the Hong Kong dollar is usually a dull currency. Except when it isn’t, like this year. When the US Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March to combat historically high inflation, fund outflows from the Hong Kong dollar market intensified as investors chased higher yields. Consequently, interbank liquidity -- the pool of Hong Kong dollars in the system -- shrank rapidly as the city fought to maintain the peg, drawing market attention and concern about the impact on the struggling local economy.

The

Oil fell as US data on stockpiles and production signaled an easing of market tightness, and a key European pipeline restarted flows.

West Texas Intermediate declined toward $91 a barrel in early Asian trading after rising on Wednesday following softer-than-expected US inflation data. US government figures showed that inventories hit the highest since December as local output climbed. In Europe, crude flows from Russia along the

The company’s credit book has been “very profitable” so far and it makes sense to keep investing, Arnt said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. Loan growth “has been a significant driver and catalyst of more adoption of our wallet,” while helping merchants and giving them greater access to working-capital, Arnt said. 

The lenders sent a letter to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the loan’s agent, on Tuesday, according to people with knowledge of the situation. 

Since Williams announced that the US Open might be her last professional tournament, demand has surged, with the US Tennis Association selling 15,700 tickets to the event on Tuesday alone — more than the previous seven days combined. Fans eager to see what could be the 23-time Grand Slam champion’s last run scooped up almost 9,000 tickets for the tournament’s first two days, which are now sold out.

David Bowie has been named Britain's most influential artist of the last 50 years for his ability to transcend music, film and fashion.

The Starman musician topped the Sky Arts list of 50 influential artists ahead of 12 Years A Slave Oscar-winning filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen and It's A Sin writer Russell T Davies, who revived Doctor Who in 2005.

In a country that only tolerates dissent in small doses—and relies on property as its economic growth engine—a mortgage boycott by hundreds of thousands of middle-class Chinese has become a five-alarm fire for authorities.

It began with a 590-word letter penned by angry purchasers of the half-built Dynasty Mansion project, whose pleas for China Evergrande Group to complete homes they’d long been paying for had fallen on deaf ears. “All homebuyers with outstanding mortgage loans will stop paying,” unless construction resumes before Oct. 20, they threatened.

Stocks extended a rally Thursday following softer-than-expected US inflation data, which stoked speculation that the Federal Reserve could pivot to a shallower pace of interest-rate hikes.

Shares added about 1% in Australia and South Korea, while Hong Kong futures were up a similar amount. US and European contracts were in the green after the S&P 500 hit a three-month high and the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 pulled 20% above a June low.

It’s trendy for employers to offer unlimited paid time off, and for good reason: To workers, it seems like a dream. Roughly 1 in 10 companies has adopted such plans, and they’re motivated by four primary benefits, none of which directly relate to employee leave.

All these benefits can blind an organization to the problems of unlimited PTO. The policy doesn’t work with hourly employees (unlimited unpaid time off can), and it can breed inequity and inconsistency, because it depends on manager approval. And, critically, a simple unlimited PTO policy doesn’t fix the problem of burnout among employees who don’t take enough time away from the office. With unlimited PTO, the always-on mentality can slip in, manifesting in people answering emails even while attempting to take time away from work, because they’re worried that a colleague who’s in the office—not lounging on the beach—might get an edge on a promotion.

For wealthy Chinese looking to flee stifling pandemic lockdowns and political tensions, Portugal has a lot to offer. Mild weather, a laid-back and affordable lifestyle and investor visas that allow access to the whole European Union — all for as little as 350,000 euros.

It’s a pitch that’s lured thousands of Chinese over the past decade, helping to reshape Portugal’s urban landscape as part of a tide of new money that reached $1 billion annually at its peak in 2014.

Singapore’s economy slipped into contraction in the second quarter, signaling more challenges for the city-state already grappling with worsening price pressures.

Gross domestic product declined an annualized 0.2% in the quarter ended June from the previous three months, according to final estimates from the Ministry of Trade and Industry released Thursday. That was worse than the preliminary estimate that showed

It’s the first time since early 2021 that the consumer price index headline reading was