February, 2020

• 18 February

  Trump’s rosy economic growth forecast isn’t crazy

  

  President Donald Trump’s new budget proposal makes some heady economic projections — 3% annual real economic growth for the first half of the decade — to justify his policies and make the budget deficit look smaller than it might otherwise be. That’s a lot higher than mainstream economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office believe is likely based ...

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• 18 February

  Thiel’s fintech banking app flees Britain

  

  Defying the gloom around the financial services industry in post-Brexit Britain, the UK has maintained its edge in fostering the industry’s digital revolution. Lured by friendly regulators, fintechs have proliferated and investors have poured billions into companies that have rattled centuries old, high-street lenders. The battleground is becoming so fierce, however, that it’s proving too much for some of the ...

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• 18 February

  How done is Sprint deal?

  Is Sprint Corp. a duck or a rabbit? Bear with us. Earlier, SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son showed investors a bemusing slide with an ambiguous image of a duck and rabbit. If you look at the picture from the right, you see a different critter than the view from the left. In his characteristically gnomic fashion, he was trying ...

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• 18 February

  Planting trees is good, but cutting emissions is better

  Overall, it’s good news that President Donald Trump has declared he’s in favour of planting trees — it’s perhaps the one thing he has in common with people who care about the long-term future of the planet. Trees not only provide a habitat for wildlife, they can mitigate global warming, to an extent. Promises to plant trees came up at ...

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• 18 February

  Yes, coronavirus is more troubling than the flu

  

  Is the world losing its collective mind about coronavirus? So far 1,665 people have died from the infection — all but 45 of them at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan province, and only two of them outside China. By contrast, some 10,000 people have died this winter from influenza in the US alone, and worldwide between 290,000 and ...

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• 18 February

  Tesla stock sale is right but feels so wrong

  

  If it involves a flurry of announcements, filings, subpoena disclosures, a stock with Lebowski levels of insouciance, a surprise equity raise and Larry Ellison backing up the truck, then we must be talking about Tesla. It’s been busy for the electric-vehicle phenomenon. Not long after Tesla Inc. filed its 10-K annual report, the company announced it would sell up to ...

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• 18 February

  Is the nuclear family really a curse for America?

  

  When the history of our era is written, scholars will search for larger causes to explain its bitterness and contradictions, despite so much wealth. Was it globalisation? Populism? Economic inequality? Polarisation? Greed? To this list you can now add an unlikely candidate: the nuclear family. In a powerful essay for The Atlantic — “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” — ...

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• 18 February

  Europe stocks advance on China lift; yen, gold decline

  

  Bloomberg European stocks rose on Monday after Chinese shares advanced with the yuan as investors took encouragement from the Asian country’s pledges to support the world’s second-biggest economy in the face of the coronavirus outbreak. The yen and gold both dipped. Gains in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index were led by automakers and miners. US equity-index futures climbed, though Wall ...

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• 18 February

  China rebounds from sell-off that erased $720bn

  

  Bloomberg China’s stocks recouped all their losses from a record $720 billion sell-off earlier this month, a sign that investor confidence is improving after policy makers acted to ease the economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. The Shanghai Composite, CSI 300 and SSE 50 indexes all rose about 2% on Monday to finish above their closing levels on January 23, ...

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• 18 February

  PBOC slashes interest for one year loans to support banks

  

  Bloomberg China’s central bank provided medium-term funding to commercial lenders and cut the interest rate it charges for the money, a move widely anticipated by analysts to cushion the economy from the virus epidemic. The People’s Bank of China offered 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) of one-year medium-term loans on Monday. The rate was lowered by 10 basis points to ...

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