October, 2019

• 30 October

  HK’s housing sales jump as first-time buyers given boost

  

  Bloomberg Hong Kong’s move to make it easier for first-time home buyers to break into the world’s least-affordable housing market has had an immediate effect, with sales surging in the past two weeks. Sales in the secondary market have more than doubled since mortgage rules for first-time buyers were eased mid-October, Midland Realty Ltd said. Primary home sales are also ...

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• 30 October

  India may hike levy on palm oil imports

  

  Bloomberg India, the world’s biggest buyer of palm oil, is considering a proposal to further increase import taxes on the refined variety to boost local processing and cut dependence on overseas purchases, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The government is discussing a proposal to impose a new levy in addition to the existing import duty and raise ...

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• 30 October

  China’s electric carmakers battle for survival after subsidies scaled back

  

  Bloomberg When Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc delivered positive earnings few saw coming last quarter, China’s top electric carmakers were weathering a historical contraction in demand. Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co, the country’s biggest maker of new energy vehicles — all-electric, fuel-cell and plugin hybrid cars — just reported an 89% slump in third-quarter earnings and warned profit could fall as much ...

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• 30 October

  Honda, Hitachi to form $17bn car parts maker in merger

  

  Bloomberg Honda Motor Co and Hitachi Ltd agreed to merge four of their car parts businesses to create a components supplier with almost $17 billion in sales, joining a wave of partnerships sweeping the global auto industry. Honda, Japan’s second-biggest carmaker, and Hitachi, one of the country’s biggest industrial conglomerates, said they will combine Hitachi Automotive Systems and Honda affiliates ...

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• 30 October

  Soho China considers $8b office tower sales

  Bloomberg Soho China Ltd is considering selling a majority of its commercial property holdings in deals that may fetch as much as $8 billion, people familiar with the matter said, sending the shares up the most on record. At least eight office towers in Beijing and Shanghai are being discussed as part of the planned sales, the people said, asking ...

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• 30 October

  The inflation mystery

  

  The virtual elimination of inflation is one of the great uncovered stories of our time. If you go back to the 1970s and the early 1980s — a period when, admittedly, many of today’s Americans weren’t alive — surging inflation seemed unsolvable. From 1975 to 1980, the consumer price index (CPI) rose an average 9% a year. There was much ...

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• 30 October

  Barclays CEO’s next big challenge

  

  Jes Staley, Barclays Plc’s chief executive officer, has a new spring in his step. After facing down an attack this year from an activist investor who wanted the British lender to shrink its investment bank, Staley has been vindicated. While a victory lap would be premature, Staley does have plenty to feel good about. His bank was able to preserve ...

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• 30 October

  Alphabet is a money making mystery but it really works

  Investors are getting constant reminders that it’s not cheap for tech giants to stay on top. Alphabet Inc. reported that its third-quarter revenue increased 21.5% from a year earlier, excluding payments to Apple and other partners that carry Google’s ads or funnel web-search traffic to the company. This continued the company’s nearly uninterrupted trend of quarterly sales gains of 20% ...

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• 30 October

  Italy’s Salvini is back with a vengeance

  Matteo Salvini is back with a vengeance. The leader of Italy’s right-wing League had disappeared from the political limelight after he tried and failed to force a new election in August, falling out of government. A triumph in a local election has shown that he’s primed for a return. Italy’s right-of-center coalition — made up of the League, the Brothers ...

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• 30 October

  India economic slump is structural, not cyclical

  

  If the India story isn’t dead, it’s certainly on life support. The economy grew at 5% in the last quarter for which data is available, leading to a rash of downward recalibrations of growth for the full financial year. (India’s financial year begins on April 1.) Most recently, the Economist Intelligence Unit suggested that growth in 2019-20 will be 5.2% ...

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