November, 2019

• 26 November

  A wealth tax will hurt charities, too

  

  America’s corporate economy has long been divided between a taxed, for-profit sector and a non-taxed, not-for-profit sector. This division has significant implications for tax policy: To wit, if the wealth gained from for-profits is penalised, the non-profit sector will also suffer. Consider the wealth taxes that have been proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Even an apparently modest annual ...

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• 26 November

  Novartis biotech deal is a $10 billion leap of faith

  Novartis AG’s latest biotech bolt-on requires a big leap of faith. The Swiss drugmaker’s $9.7 billion deal to buy Medicines Co. pays the US cardiovascular specialist’s shareholders a huge chunk of the potential gains to be had from its novel treatment for lowering bad cholesterol. Investors will have to console themselves that Novartis is big enough to absorb the cost ...

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• 26 November

  Why Uber has lost its license in London

  London first banned Uber under its buccaneer of a founding chief executive officer, Travis Kalanick — and now for a second time under Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was meant to be the adult in the room. Though the ban won’t be a popular decision among Londoners and many will call it disproportionate, it shows Uber Technologies Inc. has more ...

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• 26 November

  Trump is scaring away some foreign students

  

  The number of new international students at US universities fell for the fourth academic year in a row in 2018-2019. But only by a little bit (the new-student number was 0.9% lower than the previous year’s). These data, released by the Institute of International Education, shed a little more light on the question whether the policies and rhetoric of President ...

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• 26 November

  A model economy has stopped to drink its own ‘kool-aid’

  

  Australia is edging closer to needing a dose of extra stimulus if it’s to retain its status as the magical land where recessions don’t happen. That juice may take the form of quantitative easing — a once-unthinkable step for a country with a historical preference for budget surpluses and an economy that’s expanded continuously for 28 years. After four quarters ...

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• 26 November

  Modi finds his inner Thatcher with privatisations

  

  When it comes to shrinking the state’s role in production, the priorities of the Bharatiya Janata Party government that’s ruled India since 2014 are very different from those of its predecessor, which left power a decade earlier. And that’s something that has annoyed investors no end. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP prime minister between 1998 and 2004, gave a colleague ...

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• 26 November

  Stocks fluctuate on US-China trade outlook; bonds advance

  

  Bloomberg US equities fluctuated near record highs as investors searched for signs of progress in China’s comments about prospects for a “phase-one” trade deal. Treasuries and most European sovereign bonds rose. The S&P 500 swung between gains and losses, while European and Asian stocks were mixed after China said that Sino-American trade negotiators “reached consensus” on certain issues in a ...

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• 26 November

  Indian stocks slip from record on political shakeup

  

  Bloomberg Indian stocks slipped from a record on political uncertainty for prime minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the completion of a re-balancing of the MSCI ACWI index. The S&P BSE Sensex slipped 0.2% to 40,821.30 at the close in Mumbai and the NSE Nifty 50 Index fell 0.3%. Shares fell after a coalition government led by the BJP ...

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• 26 November

  Pound weakens as traders question ‘poll complacency’

  Bloomberg The pound slipped as polls showed the ruling Conservative party’s lead narrowing into a December election, with tightening race raising investor fears about an inconclusive result. The UK currency weakened versus all of its Group-of-10 peers as the latest surveys of voting intention showed the opposition Labour party making up some ground following the release of its manifesto. The ...

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• 26 November

  US economy’s glass ‘more than half full’: Fed’s Powell

  

  Bloomberg Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell struck an upbeat tone in gauging the ability of policy makers to extend the record US economic expansion, while signalling interest rates would probably remain on hold. “At this point in the long expansion, I see the glass as much more than half full,” Powell said in Providence, Rhode Island. “With the right policies, ...

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