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TPG consortium bids for Tata’s fiber arm

Bloomberg A management consortium backed by TPG Capital has bid for a fiber telecommunications network controlled by India’s Tata Group, people with knowledge of the matter said. The suitors offered $1 billion for fiber assets and related businesses owned by the Indian conglomerate’s Tata Teleservices Ltd. unit, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information ...

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Some policy dentistry could combat truth decay

It cannot be a sign of social health that the number of tweets per day worldwide exploded from 5,000 in 2007 to 500 million six years later. And this might be related, by a few degrees of separation, to the fact that whereas in the 1992 presidential election more than one-third of America’s 3,113 counties or their equivalents had a ...

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Are China’s banks getting safer?

Among the most important questions facing China’s economy is this: How stable are the banks? The big picture is pretty well known, and ugly. Debt stands at nearly 300 percent of gross domestic product. Some analysts think the non-performing loan ratio —officially at 1.74% —may actually be as high as 25%. Even state media is promising a ‘war on financial ...

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Defy Amazon by saying no to technology

Think you have to be online to succeed in UK retail these days? Think again. Some of the winners over the crucial holiday period don’t even sell via the internet. Although Associated British Foods Plc’s Primark suffered from the warm October —as did its rivals —its domestic sales were miles ahead. It was a similar picture at the UK arms ...

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In defense of good old per capita GDP

The quest to replace per capita GDP as a growth indicator has officially come full circle: If you aggregate the latest version —just unveiled at Davos by the World Economic Forum (WEF) —with previous attempts, the top of the resulting list isn’t that different from the original recipe. Like the other composite indicators —the United Nations’ Human Development Index, the ...

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Europe isn’t quite as united as it claims

The choreography could not have been better this week. The leaders of the euro zone’s three largest economies took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos one after the other to deliver the same message. In the era of Donald Trump’s “America First,” the leaders of Italy, Germany and France all spoke up to oppose protectionism and embrace ...

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Causes of low inflation are no mystery now

Where’s that inflation we were promised? That’s the question Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown asked economist Marvin Goodfriend during contentious hearings over his nomination to the Federal Reserve Board. In 2011, Goodfriend had said that inflation would grow more severe. But inflation, as the senators noted, has been relatively low since then. The Fed says it wants a measure ...

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Making India’s banks whole again is a good first step

For once, the fine print in India hasn’t damped enthusiasm for the broad-brush plan. New Delhi’s Rs2.11 trillion bank recapitalisation, detailed last week, goes to the heart of state-run lenders’ acute capital shortage. With a little help from the global economy—and from finance minister Arun Jaitley’s forthcoming budget—India Inc. can finally rediscover its missing animal spirits. Soaring equity valuations will ...

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Fitch sees $14bn bank bailout easing India downgrade woes

Bloomberg Pressure on the ratings of India’s state-owned banks is set to ease after the government unveiled plans to inject 881 billion rupees ($14 billion) of fresh capital to help the lenders meet looming Basel norms without hurting a nascent recovery in credit growth. “The large recapitalisation is credit positive and will stem downward pressure on viability ratings, which have ...

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DBS to hire private bankers to tap $19trn Asia market

Bloomberg DBS Group Holdings Ltd. plans to increase the number of relationship managers in its private banking business to tap into surging Asian wealth. Headcount will rise between 10 percent and 20 percent this year — after increasing more than 20% in 2017 — adding to a team that currently comprises 200 private bankers, Lawrence Lua, deputy private-banking head, said ...

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