April, 2016

• 13 April

  Business cut back on stockpiles as sales fall again in USA

  AP Businesses reduced their stockpiles for a second straight month in February, while sales fell for a seventh month. Business inventories dropped 0.1 percent, matching the decline in January, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday. Sales fell 0.4 percent in February after an even bigger 0.8 percent decline in January. Sales have been heading south since August. The weakness in ...

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• 13 April

  Brazil $8bn intervention no match for impeachment joy

  

    Bloomberg A record $8 billion intervention by Brazil’s central bank couldn’t keep the real from climbing to the highest level since August amid bets that president Dilma Rousseff will be impeached. The central bank sold 160,000 foreign-exchange reverse swaps in five different auctions Tuesday, moves that are equivalent to buying dollars in the futures market. It was the biggest ...

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• 13 April

  Brazil stares at $89bn state debt time bomb

    Bloomberg Amid the worst political crisis in decades, Brazil’s federal government also faces a spiraling state debt crisis that could cost it as much as $89 billion in lost revenue. Brazilian states, hit by a two-year recession that has depressed tax revenues, are seeking to apply simple rather than compound interest on debt owed to the federal government. The ...

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• 13 April

  The destructive threat of cyberwarfare

  

  There is a consensus that aggression by one nation against another is a serious matter, but there is no comparable consensus about what constitutes aggression. Waging aggressive war was one charge against Nazi leaders at the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials, but 70 years later it is unclear that aggression, properly understood, must involve war, as commonly understood. Or that ...

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• 13 April

  Doha meet can stabilize oil prices

    The reports of consensus over oil output freeze following talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia and signs that global glut will ease in the US, saw the crude climbing to the highest level in more than four months on Tuesday. Speculations were already rife that the two oil majors had reached an agreement, boosting expectations that a wider deal ...

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• 13 April

  Rivals should be in cahoots to stump trump

    Albert R. Hunt SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Donald Trump is getting some unlikely assistance from his opponents in his uphill effort to win a majority of Republican presidential delegates. Ted Cruz and John Kasich remain too busy battling each other to unite in opposition to the front-runner. Cruz and Kasich have the same goal: to prevent Trump from getting ...

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• 13 April

  Obamacare is smaller than anyone expected

    My recent column on the sixth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, generated some energetic criticism — or, rather, half a paragraph of it did. While I acknowledged that many Americans have benefited from the law, I also said that the Obama administration was too eager to give it credit for slowing the growth of ...

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• 13 April

  Is Australia the key to US containment of China?

  

  While the attention of the United States continues to be focused on the Middle East and the battle against IS — despite President Obama’s hope to “pivot to Asia” — China has been behaving in an increasingly aggressive way in the Eastern Pacific, claiming large swaths of ocean as its territorial waters. It has built artificial islands on reefs in ...

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• 13 April

  China’s medical diplomacy

    Pending government approval, a group of 35 doctors and nurses based in Shanghai will soon become the nation’s first medical team to join the World Health Organization’s emergency response system, specializing in disaster relief. It’s a big step, but China is no tenderfoot. Long gone are the days of the chijiao yisheng, or “barefoot doctors,” when farmers with rudimentary ...

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• 13 April

  Dividends are a better bet than share buybacks

    The biggest source of fresh cash in American equities isn’t speculators or exchange-traded funds — it’s companies buying their own stock, by a 6-to-1 margin. There’s been a lot of chatter about stock buybacks the past few years. Some people believe share repurchases are propping up the market; others think this is a myth, or a non-story. There is ...

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