March, 2020

• 1 March

  Japan can’t run out the clock on coronavirus

  The Olympic torch will arrive in Japan on March 20 for a four-month relay to launch the opening ceremonies for the Tokyo summer games. But rather than anticipating the sight of Olympic torchbearers, much of Japan is fixated on a different relay: hundreds of masked passengers grimly walking off the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama. The ship has ...

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• 1 March

  India’s economic revival starts with banks shedding bad loans

  

  India has more than a sixth of the world’s population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race. For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the ...

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• 1 March

  Real estate values got a big reality check in UK

  

  The stock market’s longstanding skepticism about official real-estate valuations just got fresh support from a jumbo writedown at one of Britain’s biggest mall and office operators. Hammerson Plc’s results are yet again catching up with its depressed share price. The company resisted a takeover bid in 2018 by pointing out that its reported net asset value was higher than the ...

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• 1 March

  Social impact investing is all about appearances

  

  One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,” which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do. The first risk is that social impact investing ...

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• 1 March

  Investors cast a wary eye on market as bad news piles up

  

  Bloomberg The first US coronavirus death. Signs the disease is squeezing China’s economy. A possible outbreak in Washington State. Trading may have stopped, but the drumbeat of alarming headlines hasn’t. That’s making investors anxious about what happens when markets reopen. While considerable bad news has already been priced in to stocks, with the S&P 500 down 13% in seven sessions ...

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• 1 March

  World’s richest lose $444b after hellish week for markets

  

  Bloomberg Last week was an expensive one for most investors, even for billionaires. The combined fortunes of the world’s 500 richest people fell by $444 billion as the coronavirus continued to spread — and spread fear — rattling equity markets worldwide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 12%, the biggest five-day slide since the depths of the 2008 ...

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• 1 March

  World economy facing worst year since ‘09 amid outbreak

  

  Bloomberg The world economy may be heading for its worst performance since the financial crisis more than a decade ago as the spread of the coronavirus increasingly dashes hopes of a swift rebound. Just weeks since most economists bet the China-led slump would quickly reverse once the virus was contained, many are rethinking that optimism as swathes of Chinese factories ...

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• 1 March

  Trump criticises Fed on need for response to virus outbreak

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump said it was “about time” the Federal Reserve acted like a “leader” and lowered interest rates, whether such a move was related to the coronavirus-driven stock market plunge or not. “If you look at the Fed, it has a massive impact, lots of it is psychological and lots of it is fact,” Trump said at a ...

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• 1 March

  RBI may take another leaf from ECB

  

  Bloomberg India’s central bank may follow up on its generous funding offer to banks with another unconventional measure as it seeks to boost lending to the real economy. The authority may unveil another European Central Bank-(ECB) styled facility called Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations to expand credit to businesses and households, after concluding an ongoing program to lend $14 billion at ...

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• 1 March

  ‘Timing matters in fiscal spree by indebted state’

  

  Bloomberg For a government with a lot of debt, timing is everything when it comes to embarking on a fiscal splurge, according to research by the European Central Bank (ECB). Interest rates at the effective lower bound can enhance the impact of a public-spending shock on the economy and largely mute debt-sustainability concerns, Niccolo Battistini and Giovanni Callegari wrote in ...

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