April, 2020

• 15 April

  Will new oil pact open Trump-Putin dialogue?

  

  Since President Trump moved into the White House, he has been eager for a dramatic initiative with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he may finally have found one in the latest announcement of a joint American-Russian-Saudi effort to stabilise world oil prices. “The big Oil Deal with Opec Plus is done,” Trump announced in a tweet thanking Putin and King ...

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• 15 April

  One contagion is enough for India

  

  India has chosen an odd combination of strategies in its fight against the coronavirus: a harsh lockdown on economic activity and a meager fiscal response to the loss of jobs and incomes. What’s making this more painful is a denial of the role of finance in both containing the fallout of the outbreak and in supporting the recovery later. Allowing ...

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• 15 April

  US’s 6 states must work together to reopen

  Six governors from a string of contiguous eastern seaboard states stretching from Rhode Island to Delaware announced that they would form a working group to cooperate on reopening businesses in the region. This kind of state-level coordination is much needed. The federal government hasn’t taken the lead in ordering coronavirus lockdowns, and so it won’t take the lead in reopening ...

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• 15 April

  Coronavirus: America is returning to 1781

  Covid-19 is not just changing Americans’ daily lives, it may also transform their system of government. On many important current issues, the US may end up with an arrangement that looks more like the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution. Consider how this might evolve. First, states and regions are recovering (or not) at dramatically different rates. The worst may ...

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• 15 April

  And Brexit is back. Even the Covid-19 can’t stop it

  

  The coronavirus pandemic has closed schools, shuttered restaurants, emptied office buildings, put PM Boris Johnson in intensive care and forced much of the UK economy into cryogenic suspension. So far, though, it hasn’t derailed Brexit. Fronting the daily UK press conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak affirmed that the government was committed to its current timetable for trade talks ...

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• 15 April

  Trump’s funding cut won’t fix WHO crisis

  

  Global health emergencies will be a fact of life in the 21st century. So, too, will be the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chronic inability to rise to the occasion. President Donald Trump is hoping that the body’s failures in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic can be corrected with punishment. The US will halt payments to the WHO to hold it ...

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• 15 April

  Post-virus reopening is more about ethics than science

  

  There is no safe way to emerge from our collective shelter-in-place orders and restart the economy before an effective Covid-19 vaccine arrives — but there are smart, science-based ways to do it. The question can’t be left entirely up to experts. It’s not a safety problem so much as an ethical one; many of us would accept a certain risk ...

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• 15 April

  Europe stocks slip with US futures; dollar advances

  

  Bloomberg Stocks in Europe edged lower while American equity-index futures retreated as investors scoured corporate earnings to gauge the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. The dollar ticked higher and Treasuries rose. The Stoxx Europe 600 index declined for the first time in five trading days. ASML Holding NV, a crucial supplier to Samsung Electronics Co., reported a 40% drop in ...

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• 15 April

  India stocks flirt with bull territory ahead of earnings reports

  

  Bloomberg India stocks rose, with the benchmark gauge set to close in bull territory, ahead of earnings reports that may give some insight into the outlook for companies under lockdown in the world’s second-most populous country. The S&P BSE Sensex advanced 2.5% to 31,450.11 as of 10:06 am in Mumbai, while the NSE Nifty 50 Index climbed by the same ...

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• 15 April

  Bitcoin at inflection point

  Bloomberg With Bitcoin trading below $7,000, technical indicators show it’s nearing a key inflection point. Based on its drop over the past week, the biggest cryptocurrency is drifting in a narrow trading band, with support at $6,500 on the downside and strong resistance at $7,000 on any potential increases. However, the GTI Vera Convergence Divergence Indicator, which measures up and ...

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