Tycoon Patrick Drahi has been telling everyone lately that he’s going to spend about 15 billion euros ($17.6 billion) building a national fiber broadband network in France. What’s more, he says his local operator SFR Group SA will have it done by 2025 and won’t take the public subsidies used by his rivals. If he follows through on the big ...
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Don’t succumb to crazy White House fatigue
That was fun. Just 240 or so hours ago, Anthony Scaramucci, absent relevant experience and credentials, became the White House communications director. It was a palace coup that also forced the departures of press secretary Sean Spicer and chief of staff Reince Priebus from the administration of President Donald Trump, and appeared to leave Steve Bannon’s future in doubt as ...
Read More »Executives are worried about Amazon not Trump
What keeps corporate leaders up at night? It isn’t the chaos in Washington or rising worker pay. It’s what Amazon.com Inc. is, or could be, doing to their business models, according to a Bloomberg analysis of earnings conference call transcripts. The expanding online behemoth has morphed from a retail category killer to a much broader enterprise that now competes with ...
Read More »Testing Canada-Mexico ties
Free trade between Canada and Mexico is in part an accident of history: two nations, each the other’s afterthought, came together in their shared race to capitalize on the US market. Now, after President Donald Trump threatened to leave the North American Free Trade Agreement, the pact’s junior partners are working more closely than ever to save it. Trump has ...
Read More »How the H-1B program fares under Trump…
Despite President Donald Trump’s frequent and public criticism of the H-1B visa program, new data released shows applicants are undeterred. The US government has received more than 300,000 H-1B visa petitions and extensions so far this year, according to data released last Wednesday by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, compared with a total of 399,349 in all of 2016. A ...
Read More »Can emerging-market discount whet the appetite?
When investors sense that consumer behavior in emerging markets is changing, they tend to shoot first and ask questions later, potentially missing opportunities. It’s well known that such stocks trade at a discount. The MSCI World With EM Exposure Index, which tracks developed-world shares that rely on emerging markets for revenue, was valued at 16.4 times forward earnings at the ...
Read More »Can Pompeo keep the CIA out of the ditch?
If the ghosts who inhabit the walls of the CIA could talk, they would tell Director Mike Pompeo to be careful. The agency is entering a danger zone where a White House in turmoil wants the CIA to take aggressive action overseas, but hasn’t developed the clear strategy or political support needed to sustain it. Pompeo is an activist, an ...
Read More »Europe’s stressed bankers are getting killed by calmness
The election of Emmanuel Macron in France vindicated euro optimists, boosted stock markets and paved the way for lenders like Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG to raise extra capital. What it didn’t do was unleash a wave of revenue growth for Europe’s top investment banks — at least judging by their latest quarterly earnings. The combination of ...
Read More »Donald Trump’s tax trade goes cold
President Donald Trump says cutting corporate taxes is his No. 1 priority after repealing Obamacare. And House Republicans laid out recently what they would like to see done with the tax code. Investors, though, appear to have lost faith in their ability to follow through. The shares of the 100 S&P 500 companies that paid the highest effective tax rates ...
Read More »As Sharif goes, politics in Pakistan failed again
Given Pakistan’s history of coups, political dysfunction and high-level graft, the Supreme Court’s decision to oust Nawaz Sharif as prime minister for lying about his allegedly ill-gotten wealth would seem a victory for transparency and the rule of law. In fact, the verdict raises as many questions as it answers. Sharif resigned on Friday when the court disqualified him from ...
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