Recent Posts

The real importance of Trump’s Mexico move

The best thing that can be said about President Trump’s latest trade initiative is that it moves the US back towards the kind of agreements Trump unwisely blew up when he became president. So, two cheers for Trump’s revamped free-trade agreement with Mexico and the one he may get soon with Canada. He wants to rebrand the package, of course, ...

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Shale dividend for utilities is ending

Maybe it’s utilities Elon Musk should have been courting for his take-Tesla-private fling. In a power-sector workshop convened by Bloomberg New Energy Finance in June, more than two-thirds of industry attendees said they think US electricity demand will have peaked by 2030. Looking at the past decade, hooking up millions of vehicles to the grid may offer the best route ...

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The earnings boom isn’t just about lower taxes

In the first quarter of this year, after-tax US corporate profits as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis went up a lot (at an 8.2 percent annualised rate over the previous quarter), but pretax profits only went up a little (1.2 percent). That raised questions of whether all those great first-quarter earnings reports were mainly just the result of ...

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