January, 2020

• 4 January

  Kim gives up on Trump, prepares to endure US sanctions

  

  Bloomberg Kim Jong-un is giving up on hopes that US President Donald Trump will lift sanctions anytime soon. Alongside the North Korean leader’s latest saber-rattling the first week of 2020 was a stunning admission: Efforts to engage the US had failed. Kim’s plan now is to find a way to survive under crushing economic sanctions while building an even stronger ...

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• 4 January

  Jess Phillips launches Labour leadership bid

  

  Bloomberg Maverick politician Jess Phillips said Labour needs a “different kind of leader” as she launched her bid to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, following the UK opposition party’s worst electoral defeat since 1935. Labour needs to regain support from “huge parts” of the working class base it has lost and is in “big trouble” if it fails, Phillips, 38, said, according ...

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• 4 January

  China names new liaison director for Hong Kong

  Bloomberg China appointed a new top liaison official for Hong Kong, replacing the former director amid months of protests in the financial hub. Luo Huining will take over from Wang Zhimin as the Hong Kong liaison office director, the government said in a two-sentence statement that didn’t elaborate on the changes. Wang was former director of China’s liaison office in ...

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• 4 January

  India’s rightward lurch is actually self-defeating

  

  For decades, Indian foreign policy has been moving slowly but methodically in a single direction: towards a greater embrace of the West. The days of non-alignment, when India believed it led the developing world in standing apart from either Cold War bloc, are over. Although successive governments in New Delhi have worked hard to avoid antagonising Beijing, it has been ...

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• 4 January

  UK PM’s $2.6trn bond supremo

  

  Robert Stheeman has been at the helm of the UK Treasury’s Debt Management Office since 2003, overseeing sales of more than $2.6 trillion of Gilts, as Britain’s sovereign bonds are known. He’s the government’s agent in the debt marketplace, the link that smooths communication between the finance ministry and its 15 primary “market-makers”. His job is to keep the UK’s ...

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• 4 January

  How to build a better bank from the scratch

  

  How does an older bank unlock the value of a nimbler, faster-growing division? That was the challenge facing Bruce Van Saun, then CFO at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). He had joined the storied firm in 2009, after their £500 billion bailout of loans and guarantees from the UK government. Within RBS, the Citizens group in the US was ...

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• 4 January

  Why it’s so hard to forecast economy

  The US economy has experienced its slowest recovery from a recession in the post-World War II era, and the longer it lasts the more evidence there is that normal cyclical patterns are missing. And their absence means market participants shouldn’t rely on them to divine the economy’s future. Consider the myriad developments that are atypical, or even the reverse of ...

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• 4 January

  A decade of climate science confirmed what we knew

  

  Over the last decade, scientists learned a great deal about the climate, much of it concerning the connection between global warming and extreme events — heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires. There has been, for many years, an understanding that a warmer world would be a more temperamental one, and measurements upon measurements show average temperature is rising in ...

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• 4 January

  Aston needs new passengers in 2020

  

  Aston Martin’s parent company hopes to take on some new passengers in 2020. They’ll be clambering aboard the luxury carmaker as it careens headlong towards a decisive fork in the road. The reputation of Chief Executive Officer Andy Palmer depends in large part on bringing the market value of Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc back towards the 4.3 billion ...

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• 4 January

  Carlos Ghosn’s drama is much better than Netflix

  

  The shock arrest and defenestration in 2018 of Carlos Ghosn, a jet-setting polyglot who bestrode the car industry for decades as head of the Renault-Nissan alliance, always had a cinematic quality to it: There was his detention in Japan shortly after disembarking from a private aircraft; the allegations (strenuously denied by Ghosn) of undeclared income and misappropriated funds; the grim ...

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