Bloomberg Europe’s fault lines were on full display at the weekend as France and Germany made a show of unity at a World War I commemoration in Paris and Poland’s leaders marched through Warsaw with far-right groups. Police estimated more than 200,000 people converged on the Polish capital on Sunday to mark the centenary of the country’s hard-fought independence in ...
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US leaders could learn much from ghosts of 1918
What would the ghosts of 1918 — not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward — tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? Ruminations about past and present are inescapable this week. America just finished a snarling, bitterly ...
Read More »Behind Face ID is a battle over costs
The $3.2 billion acquisition of Finisar Corp. by II-VI Inc. (pronounced “two-sixâ€) is really about one thing: how much it costs Apple Inc. to build iPhones with Face ID. After the first whispers emerged in 2016 that Apple was considering facial recognition technology for the iPhone, the stocks of 3-D sensor makers surged inside a few months. The story over ...
Read More »France’s fintech hopeful gets left on the shelf
Not long ago, it was difficult for payments processors to avoid being taken over. Worldpay was sold by Royal Bank of Scotland Plc in the crisis, taken public and bought again in eight years. Nordic payments group Nets went from being owned by a group of banks to private equity ownership, to public markets, before going back into private equity ...
Read More »Italy gets starvation rations from Draghi
What could the European Central Bank (ECB) realistically do to help Italy, even if it were so minded? Not much, is the depressing answer – in specific new aid anyway. That’s unless Italy ends up getting itself in such a mess that it’s forced to hand over financial control and enter into another ECB bailout program. We’re nowhere near that ...
Read More »US stocks retreat as dollar strengthens; oil rebounds
Bloomberg US stock futures turned lower and shares dropped in Europe and most of Asia on Monday as investors struggled to drum up any optimism after a roller coaster few weeks. The dollar rose, oil halted a 10-day sell-off and the pound slid as the UK’s premier fought to save her Brexit divorce plan. Futures on S&P 500, Dow and ...
Read More »Indian equities drop after weekly gains as oil-supply cut weighs
Bloomberg Indian equities dropped, reversing earlier gains, as a plan by major oil producers to cut supply to boost the fuel’s price weighed on sentiment. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex Index dropped 0.7 percent to 34,919.97 in Mumbai, after capping its first consecutive weekly gains in two months. Twenty-five of the 31 Sensex members fell on Monday, paced by a ...
Read More »SoftBank CEO to raise $21bn IPO of Japanese telecom unit
Bloomberg SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son is seeking to raise 2.4 trillion yen ($21.1 billion) in an initial public offering of his Japanese telecom business that could be the country’s largest IPO yet. The Japanese technology giant said in a prospectus it will sell 1.6 billion shares at 1,500 yen apiece in a new entity, SoftBank Corp., that will ...
Read More »Bharti Airtel bonds jump most in 5 years after buyback offer
Bloomberg Bharti Airtel Ltd.’s dollar-denominated bonds due in 2023 surged the most in five years after the company offered to buy back the securities at above the market price amid the risk of a rating downgrade. India’s second-biggest mobile phone carrier will pay $985 per $1,000 principal amount plus accrued interest for any or all of the $1.5 billion of ...
Read More »Jack Ma heads towards retirement with Singles’ Day record
Bloomberg As Jack Ma prepares to step down as chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., he does so after the online sales promotion he has championed for a decade notched another record. In its 10th iteration, the annual Singles’ Day event on November 11 notched 213.5 billion yuan ($30.7 billion) in merchandise sales, an increase of 27 percent, according to ...
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