The party at China’s oldest Western food chain is missing a key guest. China Investment Corp is joining a consortium including Hillhouse Capital and former KKR & Co. senior executives planning a $14 billion-plus acquisition of Yum China Holdings Inc, Vinicy Chan, Cathy Chan, Carol Zhong and Manuel Baigorri wrote on Wednesday. The purchase of the KFC and Pizza Hut ...
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Cash wildfire spreads among young tech firms
It’s time to get real about the financial fragility of young technology companies. Far too many are living beyond their means, flirting with disaster and putting their investors at risk. Bloomberg Opinion examined 150 US technology companies that had gone public since the beginning of 2010 and were still operating independently as of Aug 10. About 37 percent had negative ...
Read More »What China actually needs to understand about Trump
It was late November 2016, and my Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Wang Yang, was visiting Washington, DC. Over the course of my tenure as US Secretary of Commerce, the vice premier and I had developed a warm and candid relationship. Since this was to be our last official meeting, I decided to do something a bit different: take him to ...
Read More »Unwinding $7bn of investments
GAM Holding AG should be applauded for moving swiftly to resolve the crisis engulfing its 7.3 billion Swiss francs ($7.3 billion) of unconstrained absolute return bond funds. But investors are about to learn how easy – or hard – it is to find buyers for such a large group of investments at acceptable prices. It could deliver a costly lesson ...
Read More »John Studzinski’s exit says something about Blackstone
John Studzinski’s departure from Blackstone Group LP says something about the buyout firm and the value of rainmakers in the second half of their career. He’s among the finance industry’s most successful, best-connected dealmakers, with a global network and wide-ranging interests. Yet that didn’t make him invaluable to Blackstone, and suggests that advisers add most value when they work for ...
Read More »Is the US rapidly turning into an oil economy
The oil market has changed a lot over the past decade. Here, for example, is the latest data on US imports and exports of crude oil and petroleum products, released by the Energy Information Administration at the end of last month: The US has gone from a big-time net importer of oil to a small-time one. The latest base-case forecast ...
Read More »Tesla proves most lucrative, least volatile auto stock
Nikola Tesla electrified the world in the 19th century when he created the alternating-current motor and anticipated 21st century mass communication with his work on wireless transmission of voices, images and moving pictures. Unlike the Serbian-American inventor who died destitute at 86 in 1943, his namesake Tesla Inc. is so esteemed eight years after becoming a public company that its ...
Read More »Indonesian central bank’s tough love won’t crisis-proof its currency
Just how worried are emerging markets about the dollar? We’ll find out in Jakarta. Bank Indonesia is expected to hold its key rate unchanged at 5.25 percent, having preemptively lifted rates by 1 percentage points in May and June to buy itself some insurance against the stronger dollar. The Turkish lira’s meltdown over the last week may have changed Governor ...
Read More »Active money management is not dead yet
There’s a line of argument in the financial press that suggests that active money management is dying, a victim of high fees and underperformance versus low-cost indexing that captures average market returns. Newsflash: This is anything but the case. Active investing still dominates asset management around the world, and less than “18 percent of the global stock market is owned ...
Read More »The age of malware
Welcome to the Age of Malware. It promises to be a huge downer and, possibly, a great tragedy. For years, we have regarded personal computers, the internet, smartphones and various digital devices as evidence that America continues to dominate the central new technology of our time. Just last week, Apple attained a stock market value of $1 trillion — the ...
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