Blog Layout

Johnson, Corbyn trade Brexit barbs as UK election heats up

Bloomberg Prime minister Boris Johnson and his main rival, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, traded blows over Brexit as the UK prepares to vote next month on which of the two men should lead it out of the European Union. Johnson wrote an open letter to Corbyn asking him to clarify his strategy for the divorce while the Labour leader accused ...

Read More »

Trump campaign woos African-American voters

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s campaign said it’s creating a new coalition to try to bolster his support among the African-Americans. The group is named “Black Voices for Trump” and aims to recruit and engage African-American voters. Vice President Mike Pence will address the group at an event on Friday in Atlanta, according to a senior campaign official. The official said ...

Read More »

Kazakhstan seeking to ban sales of land along borders

Bloomberg The Kazakh government is seeking to ban sales of land along the country’s borders, returning to an issue that triggered mass protests three years ago. The proposed legislation would bar both foreigners and locals from buying any land in all districts bordering China and in a 25 kilometre-wide strip adjacent to Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, according to Gulzhakhan ...

Read More »

Nix on Donald Trump’s proposed next tax cut

The White House is considering another round of tax cuts, according to a story by The Washington Post’s Erica Werner, Josh Dawsey and Jeff Stein. This is a monstrously bad idea, but it’s hardly a surprise. It displays President Trump’s cavalier attitude towards budget deficits, as earlier reflected in his 2017 tax cut of $1.5 trillion over roughly a decade. ...

Read More »

We can’t live without internet

The internet came to life 50 years ago this week, with a simple message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed only two characters into the transmission of the word “login”: SRI received only “lo” — “as in ‘lo and behold!’” in the words of UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock. The UCLA terminal ...

Read More »

Google throws Fitbit into its stew of uncertainty

I hope Alphabet Inc. has a plan. The Google parent company announced that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy Fitbit Inc., a pioneer in the fitness-tracking gadgets that haven’t proved to be a lasting category of consumer electronics. Google has now spent billions of dollars developing homegrown hardware such as its Pixel smartphones and buying all or parts of ...

Read More »

A mega-merger can’t hide $12bn of debt

China has a standard road map for fixing state-owned giants that have gone off the rails: Create an even more inflated behemoth through a mega-merger, in the hope that the stronger business will be able to prop up the weaker one until the storm blows over. It’s a playbook that’s been followed in steel, shipping, energy and rolling stock — ...

Read More »

Australia is closing an iconic tourist site. Why?

In the hours before climbers were permanently barred from Uluru, the world-famous red sandstone monolith that rises from the heart of Australia, the line to ascend it snaked for hundreds of feet — past a sign posted by its aboriginal owners noting that the site is sacred, and requesting that visitors refrain from climbing it. The last-minute trekkers weren’t alone ...

Read More »

Dollar’s bad month good for economy

There’s been some chatter in markets that the rebound in equities in October and a re-steepening of the Treasury market’s yield curve are signs that investors believe the global economic outlook is looking up – or at least not getting any worse. As indicators go, those are fine, but perhaps the most telling may be the dollar. The Bloomberg Dollar ...

Read More »

Futures are pulling cryptocurrencies out of the dark

People have a love-hate relationship with the futures markets. Futures are either financial drivers of rapid economic growth, turbocharging small amounts of capital to outflank entrenched barriers to innovation, or — to a populist — they are demonic pits where speculators manipulate prices and corrupt honest real economic activity. Since people also love or hate cryptocurrency, the rise of Bitcoin ...

Read More »
Send this to a friend