January, 2020

• 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 ...

  Read More »
• 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 ...

  Read More »
• 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 ...

  Read More »
• 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 ...

  Read More »
• 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 ...

  Read More »
• 8 January

  Fed should keep looking forward

  

  The past decade experienced a revolution in how the Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy. While new tools such as quantitative easing have received the most attention, just as significant have been the changes made in how the Federal Open Market Committee sets and controls the level of short-term interest rates. Before the financial crisis, the Fed controlled short-term rates by ...

  Read More »
• 8 January

  Benettons must tread carefully on Atlantia

  The Benetton name has become tarnished in Italy. The billionaire family has become synonymous with troubled infrastructure group Atlantia SpA, now facing serious financial repercussions over the tragic collapse of the Morandi road bridge in 2018. The episode starkly underscores how business is a complex social activity which depends on much more than legal contracts between its stakeholders. The investigation ...

  Read More »
• 8 January

  Ghosn attacks system that crowned him

  Carlos Ghosn was nothing short of a celebrity in Japan. He carefully cultivated the image of a rebel outsider, but operated successfully enough within Japan Inc. to be adopted as something of a national hero after resuscitating Nissan Motor Co. He took on the system, yet scored its biggest victories when it was still intact. Ghosn ended up taking advantage ...

  Read More »
• 8 January

  Other people’s money was tech innovation of decade

  

  Technology changed every molecule of life in the 2010s. Airbnb, Uber and other young companies morphed the physical complexion of cities and how they work. The growing prevalence of e-commerce, fast internet connections and smartphones in everyone’s pockets shifted how we shop, behave and are entertained — with both good and bad ripple effects. Even the stodgiest industries were forced ...

  Read More »
• 8 January

  Hate the donor and love the donation

  

  Suppose that a nation, a company or an individual wants to give a lot of money to a university, a non-profit group or an individual researcher. Suppose that many people think that the potential donor is morally abhorrent, or has done morally abhorrent things. Is it wrong to take the money? A lot of real-world cases raise this difficult question. ...

  Read More »