December, 2019

• 24 December

  China’s got a chip on its shoulder

  

  From sanctions to export restrictions, the rest of the world views China’s chip champions like Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. with suspicion and skepticism. But inside the country, all investors see is a $300 billion-a-year golden opportunity. One could almost say that the Chinese have a chip on the shoulder by rewarding semiconductor startups with such a vengeance. Companies ...

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• 24 December

  Amazon throws its weight around in FedEx dispute

  You almost have to wonder if Amazon.com Inc. is baiting antitrust regulators. The e-commerce giant reportedly sent a message to third-party sellers instructing them to stop using FedEx Corp.’s ground-delivery network for Prime shipments. While Amazon earlier this year abandoned FedEx as a carrier for its own packages in the US, third-party merchants had still been able to work with ...

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• 24 December

  Flight shame is real but it’s not always effective

  The Swedish word flygskam or its German version, Flugscham, meaning “flight shame,” is one of the words of 2019. While it’s not easy to separate its effect on airlines’ business from other factors, the countries where people are most worried about climate change do appear to be seeing drops in avoidable air traffic. In November, the number of people taking ...

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• 24 December

  Central banks want new powers, but at what cost?

  

  Central bankers deserve credit for saving the economy from the financial crisis. They won the battle, but not the war. So now they are asking for new powers to fix the side effects of a decade of ultra-low low and even negative interest rates. The price may be a Faustian bargain with governments. The Federal Reserve had room in 2007 ...

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• 24 December

  Can I interest you in a 100-year Boris bond?

  

  A new government with an ambitious fiscal plan should be bold in how it finances such a rapid increase in state spending — especially with money so cheap. Boris Johnson has won an impressive electoral mandate for his Brexit deal, regardless of the slightly overdone jitters around sterling related to his 2020 deadline for a European Union trade deal. So ...

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• 24 December

  Satellites are changing the night sky as we know it

  

  Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites. While many people today live under the murk of light pollution, we can at least still travel to a glittering night sky in the mountains, the desert, or at sea. But if communications ...

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• 24 December

  Fed may be quietly masking efforts to calm repo market

  

  Bloomberg Wall Street sleuths are wondering whether the Federal Reserve is quietly doing more to calm the US repo market than just the headline-grabbing liquidity injections that have captivated observers for months. The New York Fed runs something called the foreign reverse repo pool, a place where other nations’ central banks can park cash. The amount outstanding has shrunk by ...

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• 24 December

  India should avoid fiscal stimulus as debt surges, IMF says

  

  Bloomberg India’s government should avoid a fiscal stimulus to spur the economy, and focus instead on cutting public debt so that financial resources can be freed up for investment, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said. While the national government has a budget deficit target of 3.3% of gross domestic product in the year through March, a better reflection of the ...

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• 24 December

  HNA group repays bond, avoiding default

  

  Bloomberg Troubled Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co repaid a 1.3 billion yuan ($185 million) bond due on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter, avoiding what could have been its first default on a publicly issued note. HNA’s move is the latest of a series of developments that have helped calm frayed nerves in China’s debt markets in recent ...

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• 24 December

  Sri Lanka names new central bank governor

  

  Bloomberg Sri Lanka appointed Weligamage Don Lakshman as the new central bank governor, days before the monetary authority is due to review interest rates. Lakshman is a former adviser to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and succeeds Indrajit Coomaraswamy, who stepped down earlier citing personal reasons. The announcement on Tuesday is among the top economic appointments by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who won ...

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