March, 2020

• 9 March

  Vietnam suspends visa waivers for eight nations

  

  Bloomberg Vietnam Premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc suspended the visa waivers for eight European countries amid growing concerns about the novel coronavirus outbreak. The decision to temporarily cancel visa-free travel for citizens of Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain followed a recommendation by the national steering committee on coronavirus prevention and control, according to a posting ...

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• 9 March

  Kim launches new ballistic missiles

  

  Bloomberg North Korea fired what appeared to be three short-range ballistic missiles off its eastern coast, raising regional security concerns as world leaders battle the spread of the coronavirus. The projectiles were fired in quick succession on Monday from a coastal area near Sondok, flying about 200 kilometers (125 miles) and reaching an altitude of about 50 kilometers before falling ...

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• 9 March

  Impeachment saga’s over, but Zelenskiy can’t rest in Ukraine

  

  Bloomberg It seemed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy could breathe a sigh of relief as Donald Trump’s impeachment ended with his acquittal by the Senate. A phone call between the two presidents over military aid had handed Zelenskiy a starring role in the saga. But the political novice — until last year his homeland’s most famous TV comic — navigated the ...

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• 9 March

  Americans might be saved from dismay in November

  

  “Enlightened statesmen,” wrote James Madison, “will not always be at the helm.” His genius extended to understatement, and until Tuesday it was approaching probable that by midnight of November’s first Tuesday, sensible Americans would be elated and distraught — elated because someone grotesquely unsuited to the presidency would have been denied that office, but distraught because such a person had ...

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• 9 March

  Why Apple controversy won’t repeat

  

  It was December 2017 and Apple Inc’s recently released iPhone X was delighting a small cohort of owners with its upgraded technology and blazing performance. At the same time, a different cohort of iPhone owners was dismayed by the slowing performance of their older models. The culprit, it turned out, was Apple: It had sent a software update that slowed ...

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• 9 March

  Virus: Markets couldn’t care less about jobs

  In ordinary times, February’s US jobs data would have been labeled as nothing short of a blowout. Treasury yields would have climbed, with the expectation that the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates alone and let the labor market run hot, reviving dormant inflation. Needless to say, these are far from normal times. US payrolls surged by 273,000 in February, ...

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• 9 March

  The ECB needs to look beyond banking giants

  Since taking over as the euro zone’s main banking supervisor, the European Central Bank (ECB) has spearheaded efforts to reduce the amount of bad loans that had cumulated throughout the great recession and the euro zone sovereign debt crisis. This pile has fallen from 6.8% of total loans at the peak in the December 2015 to 2.9% in September 2019. ...

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• 9 March

  Donald Trump commits three coronavirus errors

  

  As the coronavirus spreads, it’s increasingly clear that the US government has made mistakes. This is a difficult time to assess those mistakes, however; it’s not yet clear, and won’t be for some time, either the extent or the responsibility for things that have gone wrong. We’re going to see more articles about how things went awry, and that’s part ...

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• 9 March

  Why Sanders’ tax proposal won’t work

  

  Recently, the S&P 500 ETF SPY traded over $100 billion in volume in a single day. With a .1% financial transactions tax, something that a few US presidential hopefuls had proposed, that volume would have generated $100 million in government revenue. Those types of numbers have lawmakers salivating over the potential to raise untold amounts of money from applying very ...

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• 9 March

  How airlines make money with free tickets

  

  For travellers intrepid enough to share an aircraft with a group of strangers in the grip of an epidemic, now is a great time for bargains. Americans can get return flights from New York to Miami right now for around $51, Bloomberg News reported earlier. In China, premium budget carrier Juneyao Airlines is offering one-way tickets for the three-and-a-half hour ...

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