January, 2020

• 8 January

  China’s Citic tightens grip over CLSA unit

  

  Bloomberg Citic Securities Co is tightening control over its CLSA Ltd unit, following an exodus of staff and top executives from the Hong Kong brokerage last year amid a clash over corporate culture and bonus levels. China’s biggest broker is creating a “coordination committee” at CLSA, which will include its president Yang Minghui and Chairman Zhang Youjun, according to people ...

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• 8 January

  India court revives overseas probe into tycoon Adani’s firms

  

  Bloomberg India’s Supreme Court revived the nation’s revenue department’s bid to investigate billionaire Gautam Adani’s companies, which the agency claims got undue tax benefits by overvaluing coal imports. A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice SA Bobde on Wednesday put on hold a lower court’s ruling, effectively allowing the revenue office to seek information on the case from overseas. The ...

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• 8 January

  Samsung profit beats after chip prices climb

  

  Bloomberg Samsung Electronics Co’s quarterly earnings beat estimates after memory chip prices began to climb out of a persistent downturn. The world’s largest memory chip maker reported a 34% fall in operating income to 7.1 trillion won ($6.1 billion) in the three months ending December, according to preliminary results released on Wednesday by the Suwon, South Korea-based company. That compares ...

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• 8 January

  China’s super wealthy are twice as likely to have real estate to thank, reports UBS

  

  Bloomberg China’s wealthy families are twice as likely as global peers to have made their millions in real estate, according to a report co-authored by UBS Group AG, which found an increasing focus on wealth preservation and succession. Almost 30% of participants surveyed said their family wealth came from property, followed by consumer discretionary and industrials. The swelling ranks of ...

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• 8 January

  Iran retaliates with missile strike on US-Iraqi airbases

  

  Bloomberg Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at US-Iraqi airbases in retaliation for an American airstrike that killed a top Iranian general, yet the potential for a dramatic escalation was mitigated by the fact that there were no US casualties. A US official said guided missiles were used in the attacks, and Iran appeared to be shooting to miss. ...

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• 8 January

  Putin’s Syria trip shows he’s unfazed by Iran tension

  

  Bloomberg With the world on edge over rising tensions in the Middle East, one leader seems unfazed: Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The Russian president arrived in Damascus in just his second visit to Syria since the start of the country’s civil war nearly nine years ago. The timing is significant. The US and its allies are assessing the damage after Iran ...

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• 8 January

  Trump’s targeted Iran killing is Kim Jong-un’s biggest fear

  

  Bloomberg If Kim Jong-un needed another reminder about the risks of bargaining away North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme to the US, President Donald Trump’s decision to kill one of Iran’s top commanders provides one. The killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani reinforces the North Korean view that the US only takes such actions against states that lack a credible nuclear ...

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• 8 January

  Guaido reclaims Venezuela National Assembly

  

  Bloomberg Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido reclaimed the National Assembly that he heads, pushing past armed guards two days after President Nicolas Maduro’s loyalists blocked him from attending his own re-election. Guaido and his allies burst through the legislative palace’s doors minutes after a pro-government group led by lawmaker Luis Parra, who had claimed the presidency of the body, scurried ...

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• 8 January

  EU says UK won’t get full post-Brexit deal in 2020

  

  Bloomberg Boris Johnson will have to choose which areas he wants to focus on if he’s to get an agreement on the UK’s future relationship with the European Union before his year-end deadline, the European Commission president said. In her first major intervention on Brexit since she took up her post on December 1, Ursula von der Leyen said the ...

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• 8 January

  Why 2020 is harder to predict than 2019 was

  

  My main prediction for 2020, if it can be called a prediction, is trend exhaustion: For the first time in a long while, several important trends have come to an end. What do I mean by that? Trends ebb and flow, of course, but at any given moment many of them embody one of two distinct states: momentum, or reversion ...

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