Bloomberg The disclosure that one of Japan’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges lost about $400 million in NEM tokens is spooking investors in a country still wary of such venues four years after the collapse of Mt. Gox. After hours of speculation, Coincheck Inc. said the coins were sent “illicitly†outside the venue. Co-founder Yusuke Otsuka said the company didn’t know how ...
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Permira to buy Australia’s I-Med for $1.1 billion
Bloomberg Permira has agreed to buy Australia’s I-Med Radiology Network from EQT Partners and other investors, the Swedish buyout firm said in a statement. Permira, the London-based private equity firm, will pay about $1.1 billion for I-Med, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. The transaction, Permira’s first ...
Read More »Khosrowshahi to make first Asia visit as Uber CEO in Feb
Bloomberg Uber Technologies Inc.’s Dara Khosrowshahi has scheduled his first visit to Asia since taking over as chief executive officer amid questions about the ride-hailing giant’s future in the region. Khosrowshahi will visit Japan and India during the week of February 19 to meet business and government leaders, said Chris Brummitt, a spokesman for Uber. The CEO will discuss ways ...
Read More »China economy starts 2018 on solid trajectory
Bloomberg As the latest China data showed some softening at the end of an upbeat year, reports for this month are looking likely to show the economy keeping pace despite slowing industrial profits. The earliest indicators for January show momentum remains intact, with sales managers the most upbeat since July, financial experts more optimistic, and satellite imagery signalling manufacturing conditions ...
Read More »TPG consortium bids for Tata’s fiber arm
Bloomberg A management consortium backed by TPG Capital has bid for a fiber telecommunications network controlled by India’s Tata Group, people with knowledge of the matter said. The suitors offered $1 billion for fiber assets and related businesses owned by the Indian conglomerate’s Tata Teleservices Ltd. unit, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information ...
Read More »Some policy dentistry could combat truth decay
It cannot be a sign of social health that the number of tweets per day worldwide exploded from 5,000 in 2007 to 500 million six years later. And this might be related, by a few degrees of separation, to the fact that whereas in the 1992 presidential election more than one-third of America’s 3,113 counties or their equivalents had a ...
Read More »Are China’s banks getting safer?
Among the most important questions facing China’s economy is this: How stable are the banks? The big picture is pretty well known, and ugly. Debt stands at nearly 300 percent of gross domestic product. Some analysts think the non-performing loan ratio —officially at 1.74% —may actually be as high as 25%. Even state media is promising a ‘war on financial ...
Read More »Defy Amazon by saying no to technology
Think you have to be online to succeed in UK retail these days? Think again. Some of the winners over the crucial holiday period don’t even sell via the internet. Although Associated British Foods Plc’s Primark suffered from the warm October —as did its rivals —its domestic sales were miles ahead. It was a similar picture at the UK arms ...
Read More »In defense of good old per capita GDP
The quest to replace per capita GDP as a growth indicator has officially come full circle: If you aggregate the latest version —just unveiled at Davos by the World Economic Forum (WEF) —with previous attempts, the top of the resulting list isn’t that different from the original recipe. Like the other composite indicators —the United Nations’ Human Development Index, the ...
Read More »Europe isn’t quite as united as it claims
The choreography could not have been better this week. The leaders of the euro zone’s three largest economies took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos one after the other to deliver the same message. In the era of Donald Trump’s “America First,†the leaders of Italy, Germany and France all spoke up to oppose protectionism and embrace ...
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