Business News at a Glance

Co-Founder of Chinese Giant HNA Dies in France

The co-chairman and co-founder of HNA Group, a Chinese conglomerate that spent heavily in recent years to build a global profile but that has since grappled with high debt, died from an accidental fall in France, the company said Wednesday. The death of Wang Jian, 57, a former civil aviation official who became one of China’s richest men, comes as the company has been trying to tame its debt of more than $90 billion. It could also cast further doubt on HNA’s murky ownership, which has prompted some Wall Street banks to stop doing business with it. Wang owned a 15 percent stake of the company.

Why Made in China 2025 Will Succeed, Despite Trump

China will succeed in building a powerful technology industry that will rival the United States, even if President Donald Trump starts a trade war to stop it. Beijing’s vision of Made in China 2025 — the ambitious state-driven plan to retool China’s industries to compete in areas like automation, microchips and self-driving cars — is not being pushed just by the Communist Party’s top leaders. Instead, the drive is also coming from the bottom up: from the businesses and cities across China that know they must modernize or perish.

China Frees Australian Executive at Center of Diplomatic Dispute

When Stern Hu was convicted in 2010 of corruption charges and sent to prison in China, the Australian mining executive’s fate strained ties between Canberra and an important trading partner. Eight years later, the world has changed. But as Hu, a former Rio Tinto executive, left jail on Wednesday, having served most of a 10-year sentence, many of the concerns about a deep but fraught economic and political relationship between the two countries have not. In fact, Australia passed sweeping national security legislation last week that bans foreign interference in politics and makes it a crime to damage Australia’s economic relations with another country.

How Trump’s Policy Decisions Undermine the Industries He Pledged to Help

“The assault on the American auto industry is over,” President Donald Trump declared last spring in Detroit, promising auto executives that he would throttle back Obama-era regulations on vehicle pollution. The moment embodied one of Trump’s main political promises — to promote pro-business policies that unshackle industry and the economy. Even as the president’s pro-business stance is broadly embraced by the corporate community, in some significant cases the very industries that Trump has vowed to help say that his proposals will actually hurt them. They also warn that policies designed to aid one group will eat into someone else’s business in ways that policymakers should have anticipated.

Saudi Arabia Promised More Oil, But Prices Are Rising

Officials from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and other major oil producers like Russia pledged last month to increase total output by around 1 percent of the global oil supply. President Donald Trump has pressed the issue further, calling for lower oil prices. Yet prices have remained stubbornly high. The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has risen more than 20 percent so far this year, to around $78 a barrel. Saudi Arabia is under pressure to quickly increase its production of oil, but those increases may not be enough to offset declines in three countries grappling with crises: Iran, Libya and Venezuela.