October, 2019

• 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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• 30 October

  Sun Belt cities in US are dangerous places to walk

  

  The US Department of Transportation has published its most recent data on fatal motor vehicle crashes. In 2018, 36,560 people were killed in crashes, down 2.4% from 2017, which was in turn down 0.9% from 2016. According to the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatalities fell in every segment except for large trucks and “non-occupant fatalities” — pedestrians and ...

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• 30 October

  Get ready to ditch your business class flight

  

  Stepping off the Eurostar train at London’s glorious St. Pancras station is always a thrill, but on a recent Sunday evening it felt downright radical. Unusually, I’d started my journey more than 10 hours earlier and 600 miles (966 kilometers) away in Berlin. I was attending a summit on decarbonising the economy organized by BloombergNEF and turning up by plane ...

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• 30 October

  Inflation surge restricts China’s monetary policy

  

  Bloomberg China’s room to ease monetary policy to aid the slowing economy is being limited further by price rises due the ongoing swine fever epidemic, economists said. Analysts from Nomura International Ltd and Changjiang Securities Co warned that surging consumer inflation has become a major constraint on the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), and the likelihood for major monetary easing ...

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• 30 October

  Dollar looks poised to weather Fed cuts

  

  Bloomberg Investors are bracing for the dollar to keep appreciating through at least early 2020 even though the Federal Reserve looks poised to cut rates and the risk of a US recession remains elevated. The dollar has already surprised investors by holding steady even after Fed reductions in July and September. Now, with the world’s growth outlook decidedly downbeat, Columbia ...

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• 30 October

  Kenya can do more to boost credit: IMF

  

  Bloomberg Kenya should do more than removing interest-rate caps to boost access to finance and credit extension, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Africa director said. “There is also a need to foster more competition in the banking system,” Abebe Selassie said in an interview in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The sector should “have effective credit bureaus and quick resolution of disputes,” ...

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• 30 October

  ‘RBA could embark on unorthodox policies’

  

  Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) could turn to unconventional monetary policy as soon as February following the decision by lenders to only pass on part of the latest interest-rate cut, according to Citigroup Inc. The central bank is likely to cut again in February, and with lenders’ ability to pass on such reductions now constrained “this date is ...

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• 30 October

  Swedbank faces high risk of fines as watchdog weighs sanctions

  

  Bloomberg Swedbank AB faces an increased risk of fines amid allegations its Baltic operations may have handled more than $100 billion in potentially suspicious funds, the lender’s regulator said. Sweden’s financial watchdog gave its strongest indication yet that there’s evidence of serious wrongdoing at Sweden’s oldest bank and biggest mortgage lender. Its findings to date show there could be grounds ...

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