Bloomberg Slovak anti-corruption parties — propelled by lingering anger at the killing of an investigative reporter two years ago — scored an unexpectedly large majority in elections. Four groups, led by Ordinary People, garnered 45% of votes, which would represent 95 mandates in the 150-seat parliament, results from nearly all election districts showed. They’ve vowed to join forces to dislodge ...
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Sanders looking to knock out Warren on her home turf
Bloomberg Bernie Sanders is looking to deliver a knock-out blow to his progressive competitor Elizabeth Warren on Super Tuesday by winning the primary on her home turf of Massachusetts. Sanders, the national front-runner, is making an aggressive push in the Bay State in the last few days before the March 3 Democratic ballot. He held a rally there last week ...
Read More »Tear gas, petrol bombs return to HK protests
Bloomberg Hong Kong police fired tear gas to disperse protesters who returned to the city streets for a rally that turned violent. Protesters gathered outside Mong Kok police station in Kowloon and paralysed traffic, the Hong Kong government said in a statement. The demonstrators threw petrol bombs and set fire to barricades, according to the statement. Police used pepper spray ...
Read More »Trump’s coronavirus press conference wasn’t reassuring
Believe it or not, I was all ready to praise Donald Trump this time. I really thought when he announced a press conference that he would manage to stick to a reasonable script, and there were very promising rumors that he was prepared to make an excellent choice for a new coronavirus czar. Why? Because so much was on the ...
Read More »Winters give bank stability amid virus
Standard Chartered Plc may have many failings. At least it has a leader. The London-based emerging markets bank run by Bill Winters hasn’t had the best of years, and the outlook, with so much exposure to virus-affected Hong Kong, is looking grim. It does, though, have a stable team, led by a CEO about to complete five years in the ...
Read More »Xerox is edging closer to fixing its HP printer jam
Carl Icahn looks increasingly likely to get his way, even if it’s not on his own terms. The activist investor’s fingerprints appear all over Xerox Holdings Corp.’s $35 billion attempt to acquire HP Inc. But it always looked as if he might prefer the deal to happen the other way around. Indeed, he pitched an acquisition of Xerox to HP ...
Read More »Japan can’t run out the clock on coronavirus
The Olympic torch will arrive in Japan on March 20 for a four-month relay to launch the opening ceremonies for the Tokyo summer games. But rather than anticipating the sight of Olympic torchbearers, much of Japan is fixated on a different relay: hundreds of masked passengers grimly walking off the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama. The ship has ...
Read More »India’s economic revival starts with banks shedding bad loans
India has more than a sixth of the world’s population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race. For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the ...
Read More »Real estate values got a big reality check in UK
The stock market’s longstanding skepticism about official real-estate valuations just got fresh support from a jumbo writedown at one of Britain’s biggest mall and office operators. Hammerson Plc’s results are yet again catching up with its depressed share price. The company resisted a takeover bid in 2018 by pointing out that its reported net asset value was higher than the ...
Read More »Social impact investing is all about appearances
One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,†which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do. The first risk is that social impact investing ...
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