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Jaguar Land Rover is still misfiring

Jaguar Land Rover’s job cuts will do little for its turnaround plans. The UK luxury unit of India’s Tata Motors Ltd. will eliminate 4,500 positions globally as part of a $3.2 billion cost-cutting program outlined in November. The savings will be relatively minor. Workforce reductions are now standard in an industry struggling to deal with rising costs from technology, pricier ...

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Xiaomi’s wishful thinking is on display in 5G hopes

Investors waiting for 5G to boost Xiaomi Corp.’s fortunes might as well take their money elsewhere. Founder and CEO Lei Jun told Bloomberg News that he expects the advent of next-generation wireless to energize demand for its smartphones: We are at the eve of 5G and when 5G phones start to get popular, the overall demand from China will recover. ...

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Germany’s economy could soon need a boost

The latest data on Germany’s economy is surprisingly grim. Industrial production fell sharply in November, and the country is on the brink of a technical recession. Its government should get ready to loosen fiscal policy if output doesn’t bounce back soon. November’s 1.9 percent month-on-month decline in industrial production followed a 0.8 percent drop in October. The economy’s overall output ...

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Five fiscal messes India can’t blame on the RBI

Instead of blaming the central bank at every opportunity for its poor stewardship of the economy, India’s finance ministry should reflect on its own record, especially its five failures of fiscal policy in almost as many years. The most obvious is the goods and services tax. A month after the levy went into effect in July 2017, a little over ...

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Rising cost of socially responsible investing

Both companies and the fund managers that invest in them are under pressure to pay more attention to environmental, social and governance issues. For the former group, that requires delivering increased transparency on an ever-expanding range of metrics. For the investment crowd, tailoring strategies to address the new demands means increased spending on data — at a time when fees ...

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Apple needs to imagine its post-iPhone future

Apple’s reported plans to cut iPhone production by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2019 make increasingly clear that the company’s base of loyal users isn’t an inexhaustible resource from whom it can forever extract a rent through its services offerings. Apple needs to compete more vigorously in all the other markets in which it’s present, without relying on ...

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Trading business improved from 2018’s rough end: Citi

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc offered some hope that the worst is over for its bond-trading business after the toughest quarter for that unit in seven years. The lender’s shares jumped almost 4 percent, the most in the S&P 500 Index, after Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said the trading environment was starting to improve this month. The brighter outlook came after ...

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Banks win break on trading-desk capital

Bloomberg Big investment banks scored a victory in their campaign to soften global rules, as regulators reduced the capital hit from new trading-book standards by nearly half. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said its final market-risk standards will drive up banks’ trading-book capital requirements by a weighted average of about 22 percent from current levels. That’s down from the ...

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‘Fed may not raise rates as much as projected’

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida left open the possibility the US central bank will raise interest rates in 2019 fewer than the two times projected by policy makers at their last meeting. “A lot has really happened since the first week of December,” Clarida said in an interview on Fox Business Network. “Some of the global growth data ...

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EIB sued over $69mn biomass loan

Bloomberg The European Investment Bank (EIB) is being sued in the region’s second-highest court over a Spanish loan that climate lawyers contend will damage the environment. The suit is being brought by the not-for-profit environmental advocacy group ClientEarth, which wants European Union judges to determine whether the EIB breached its own renewable energy-financing criteria. The London-based group said it’s the ...

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