Bloomberg Germany’s 10-year bond yields are set to climb from the all-time low reached last week, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Benchmark yields fell to a record 0.009 percent on Friday. While economists have reduced their year-end yield estimates since January, they don’t foresee that level as sustainable. The median forecast of 19 economists in a Bloomberg survey ...
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Putin could sketch deal on Europe gas link in talks with Juncker
Bloomberg Jean-Claude Juncker and Vladimir Putin may offer clues about the way forward for a controversial project to expand Russia’s gas interconnections with Europe this week. The European Commission president meets the Russian leader at a conference in St. Petersburg and may discuss ways a Gazprom PJSC-led consortium could be allowed to double the capacity of the Nord Stream ...
Read More »London’s FTSE 100 faces rival index from Kansas
Bloomberg The 32-year-old FTSE 100 Index, synonymous with the U.K. stock market, is about to get some competition. The benchmark’s four-letter moniker is local shorthand for laypeople and professionals to describe the daily gyrations of the nation’s $3.3 trillion equity market. Now, Lenexa, Kansas-based rival Bats Global Markets Inc. is now trying to muscle in on the FTSE 100’s ...
Read More »Vancouver housing boom is squeezing out families, says Canada’s Bill Morneau
Bloomberg Vancouver’s housing boom is squeezing out some families as growth draws in new residents faster than dwellings can be built, according to Canada’s finance minister said. “If you are in Vancouver today, it’s challenging for people to think about how they can get into the market and how their children can get into the market,†Bill Morneau said ...
Read More »Malabar Exercise: A platform for Indo-Pacific cooperation?
On June 7, the United States, India, and Japan began the twentieth iteration of the Malabar Exercise. In the two decades of its existence, the exercise, which began as a joint U.S.-India naval drill back in 1992, has evolved into not just a key aspect of U.S.-India defense ties, but a key platform for engagement in the Indo-Pacific more ...
Read More »China’s innovation dream: Mission Impossible?
David Gitter SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The term “innovation†has been a hot word these days in Chinese politics. It was one of the five high-frequency terms used by General Secretary Xi Jinping in his deliberations at this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (the others were reform, people’s livelihood, ecology, and work style), ...
Read More »Economics comes up short in coping with reality
There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused. The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,†and it’s what you hear in a ...
Read More »Obama’s Social Security failure
WASHINGTON President Obama unintentionally damaged his legacy the other day by urging an expansion of Social Security benefits and, thereby, reminding everyone (and particularly future historians) that he failed to deal with one of the largest issues facing the country: an aging society. “It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees ...
Read More »Revival of economy can bail out Maduro
Opponents in Venezuela are pushing President Nicolas Maduro to the wall, accusing him of driving the oil-rich country to the brink of economic collaps. They have launched a marathon process to call a vote on ousting him from office. But Maduro is defiant as he vowed on Saturday that the government would be suing to have the referendum request ...
Read More »Buying junk debt shows ECB is getting desperate
Would you lend taxpayer money to Volkswagen AG, the disgraced automaker that’s worth 35 percent less than it was a year ago? How about providing financial succor to Telecom Italia, which both Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings regard as a junk borrower unworthy of investment grade status? Those are just some of the unintended consequences of the ...
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