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Manufacturing sector just keeps adding more jobs

The manufacturing mini-renaissance continues. Over the past year, according to today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sector has added 222,000 jobs, resuming a recovery that had paused in 2015 and 2016 amid strength in the dollar and weakness in the US oil and gas industry. As is somewhat apparent from the previous chart and is clear ...

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Big technology firms are behaving like a big bank

Picture a bank that lends $1 billion to small businesses in 12 months, holds $150 billion in corporate bonds, runs the world’s largest money-market fund, offers mobile payments and credit cards, and gives customers cash balances that can be topped up across thousands of homely bricks-and-mortar outlets. Except it’s not really a bank at all, but a technology firm. Google ...

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China central bank quietly gets a little autonomy

China looks set to get a new central bank governor this month. Incumbent Zhou Xiaochuan has seen it all during his 15 years in office: China’s surge to become the second-largest economy, the global financial crisis, ending the yuan’s fixed peg to the dollar and winning the currency inclusion in the IMF’s reserve basket. For all those changes, the People’s ...

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