Bloomberg General Electric Co jumped as Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp accelerated plans to pare the company’s stake in Baker Hughes with a deal that wo- uld raise about $4 billion at current prices. GE will sell as many as 166.2 million shares in the oilfield-services provider through a secondary offering and a stock repurchase by Baker Hughes, the companies ...
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PG&E investors may not get California’s help soon
Bloomberg As prices of stocks and bonds issued by PG&E Corp touch record lows, investors probably won’t get any certainty soon from the incoming California governor on how he would deal with the utility’s liabilities from the fatal fires ravaging the state. In a brief news conference with Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who will succeed him in ...
Read More »Johnson Controls seals $13.2bn battery unit deal
Bloomberg Johnson Controls International Plc’s $13.2 billion sale of its car-battery business completes the company’s dramatic makeover from an automotive supplier to a provider of systems for homes and buildings, setting the stage for growth through acquisitions. Chief Executive Officer George Oliver is betting on continued growth of “smart buildings†as companies seek to boost efficiency of working spaces with ...
Read More »UK inflation stays at 2.4% in October
Bloomberg An anticipated pickup in UK inflation failed to materialise last month as food, clothing and transport prices declined. Annual consumer-price growth stayed at 2.4 percent in October, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The figure is below the 2.5 percent predicted by both the Bank of England and economists in a Bloomberg survey. Food and non-alcoholic drink ...
Read More »Xi Jinping, not Trump, is the true cold warrior
The US-China trade war is looking more and more like a cold war. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, crackdown on alleged Chinese theft of American technology, and rhetoric have overturned decades of US foreign policy that had prioritised cooperation. Meanwhile, his counterpart Xi Jinping hasn’t budged on any concessions. China experts worry that relations between the world’s two most important countries ...
Read More »Italy’s money problems are starting
Italy has managed to scrape by with its 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) monthly auction of three, seven and 20-year government bonds on Tuesday. It has now completed nearly 95 percent of its annual funding target, but that’s where the good news ends. It is still visibly struggling to place longer-dated paper. Benchmark 10-year yields stayed high, even after the ...
Read More »Malaysia’s market calm rests on sticky foundations
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been lucky, so far. His country looks to have come out of this year’s emerging-markets rout largely unscathed. The ringgit has fallen only 3.4 percent against the dollar, while the MSCI Malaysia Index has dipped a mere 5.9 percent, compared with a 16 percent slump for the broader emerging-markets gauge. Beneath the calm is ...
Read More »Three-minute chat that wiped billions off stocks
A three minute conversation on stage at UBS AG’s Global Technology Conference in San Francisco helped wipe more than $190 billion from global stocks. Lumentum Holdings Inc. makes lasers for 3D facial recognition used by major smartphone makers, with Apple Inc. its key client. On Monday, the company announced a 17 percent cut in its December-quarter revenue outlook. That triggered ...
Read More »India’s shadow banks may need to suffer some pain
In India, crises move slowly. We’ve known for years that the state-controlled banks that dominate the financial sector were groaning under the weight of bad loans. For years, though, the government successfully kicked the can down the road. All those assets haven’t been accounted for yet, the banks haven’t been fully recapitalised, the bankruptcy process isn’t working to schedule, yet ...
Read More »Banks will pay for China’s ‘obsession’
Chinese regulators have stepped back from imposing hard-and-fast rules on how much banks must lend to the cash-starved private sector. Their exhortation isn’t going away, though, and that means investors in shares of lenders should prepare for more pain. Authorities will refrain from imposing specific targets for each bank and are urging firms to conduct appropriate due diligence, according to ...
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