What a difference a few time zones make. Shares in Wynn Resorts Ltd. fell 10.1 percent in the US on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that dozens of former employees had alleged sexual misconduct by the group’s founder and Chief Executive Officer Steve Wynn. Investors in Hong Kong were far less concerned. Stock in Wynn Macau Ltd. was ...
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Euro’s surprises may just be getting started
The euro is on the move, due to positive fundamental and technical reasons. And there is likely still more upside ahead — potentially a lot more. The realities of a strong economy will put pressure on the European Central Bank’s president, Mario Draghi, to start mapping an exit strategy from ultra-accommodative measures before inflation becomes a problem. In 2017, the ...
Read More »The end of the ‘strong dollar’ policy, yes, again
The end of US leadership is on everyone’s lips. Today’s installment is the Treasury secretary’s endorsement of a weaker dollar. Not so fast. Despite the way the ideal of a ‘strong dollar’ has been thrown around in official rhetoric the last couple of decades, the reality is that Treasury secretaries of both political colors have dialed it up and dialed ...
Read More »Starbucks falls out of step with the restaurant industry
It would be an overstatement to say 2017 was a bad year for Starbucks Corp. But the coffee giant did start to look a bit less invincible. It posted its slowest same-store sales growth since the Great Recession. It disappointed investors in November when it offered a lower long-term earnings outlook. If that had you worried about Starbucks, then the ...
Read More »A great world city may soon run out of water
On April 22, Earth Day, might have a bit of extra significance this year. It might be the day that, for the first time, a great world city runs out of water. On that day, according to the local government of Cape Town, water in the reservoirs that feed this most beautiful of coastal cities will drop below critical levels, ...
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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