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Kosovo’s president Thaci seeks to remove border with Albania

Bloomberg Balkan neighbours Albania and Kosovo need to work on greater unity, a goal that will be easier to achieve than Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia, President Hashim Thaci said during a visit to Albania, the Koha Ditore newspaper reported. “We will live in the near future in a joint Kosovo-Albania state,” Thaci said on his visit to Albania, ...

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Trump downplays Kim’s missile test, revels in Biden insult

Bloomberg President Donald Trump downplayed a recent missile test by North Korea, a day after his national security adviser called the actions a violation of United Nations resolutions, and took a fresh swing at Democrat Joe Biden, the top 2020 Democratic contender. On Twitter Trump said Pyongyang’s firing of “some small weapons” this month “disturbed some of my people, and ...

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Trump confronts China’s technology threat head on

Huawei’s name is often translated in English as “Chinese excellence.” The Trump administration embarked on a campaign to rebrand the tech giant, in effect, as a “Chinese threat” and check its expansion in the West. The Huawei assault may be the Trump administration’s most important long-term strategic decision, because it confronts China’s technological challenge to America head on. The goal ...

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Treat Facebook like big tobacco

People are mad at Facebook — for being too big, too powerful, too omniscient. Last week a co-founder of the company joined the calls from politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren for the government to break up the social media giant. Facebook has repeatedly asked for regulation, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg appealing to the government in a Washington Post op-ed this ...

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Japan Inc is doing better than people realise

Investors should get used to more big surprises from Japan. The country’s economy grew an annualised 2.1% in the first quarter, defying economists’ expectations for a contraction. The government wasn’t expecting good news: Earlier this month, it moved its provisional assessment of the economy to “worsening” from “weakening” for the first time in six years after an index of economic ...

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Victorious Modi faces a $1.4 trillion roadblock

Don’t get your hopes up that India’s infrastructure will start to look like China’s after Narendra Modi’s historic victory. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party made big promises in its election manifesto, among them 100 trillion rupees ($1.4 trillion) of investments in infrastructure by 2024 that would double the length of highways by 2022 and lead to a similar increase in the ...

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Low-priced airline tickets won’t be around for long

Greta Thunberg probably isn’t a fan of Ryanair Holdings Plc. The 16-year-old Swedish activist took the train to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January to castigate the rich and powerful adults there for failing to tackle the unfolding climate emergency (most of them had arrived by plane). Three months later Ryanair was revealed to be one of Europe’s ...

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Who is winning the US-China trade war?

With some corners of the market betting the Federal Reserve will cut rates three times this year, you might expect cheers from emerging markets. Not so in Indonesia. Lats week, the central bank was busy defending its currency, placing bids to prop up its government bonds to halt the rupiah’s slide. As the trade war escalates, Jakarta became the first ...

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The next banking scandals are going to be personal

Since the financial crisis, banking scandals have been expensive; now the attention may turn increasingly personal. After more than $372 billion of fines, significant progress has been made in getting the industry to root out wrongdoing. Just recently, the European Commission fined five companies a total of 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for colluding in the foreign-exchange market. Financial firms, ...

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Tame inflation makes $131bn bond-auction deluge palatable

Bloomberg A $131 billion deluge of Treasury notes is about to hit with yields at their lowest in more than a year. But bond traders can take heart: This week is also expected to bring confirmation that inflation remains tame, which could bolster demand. The trade impasse enveloping the US and China has put global economic growth in question and ...

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