October, 2019

• 21 October

  Marks & Spencer is starting to look more like Whole Foods

  

  Bloomberg For a taste of CEO Steve Rowe’s ambitions to transform Marks & Spencer Group Plc, look no further than its newly refurbished shop in London’s Clapham neighbourhood. The store looks more like a Whole Foods Market than one of the 135-year-old British retailer’s more traditional outlets. Alongside piles of avocados and herbs grown with the help of artificial intelligence ...

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• 21 October

  Shell quits Kazakh oil projects

  

  Bloomberg Royal Dutch Shell Plc abandoned two oil projects off Kazakhstan after stubbornly high costs made them uneconomic. Shell has exited the Khazar field, while North Caspian Operating Co. — a joint venture including Shell — has quit the Kalamkas-Sea project, according to TOO PSA, an entity run by the Kazakh Energy Ministry. The retreat from the fields — both ...

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• 21 October

  Protests in Chile may disrupt copper supply

  Bloomberg Anti-government protests that have shaken the world’s largest copper producing nation Chile for the past three days have spread to the mining sector as unions call for stoppages. Workers at BHP Ltd.’s Escondida mine will hold a “warning stoppage” for 10 hours in solidarity with protests. The stoppage risks disrupting copper supply from the world’s largest producer, with ports ...

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• 21 October

  Britain’s Boris Johnson is trumpeting a fake success

  

  The deal Boris Johnson has struck with the rest of the European Union over Britain’s withdrawal follows a familiar pattern. Much like other populist politicians in Europe, the British prime minister is trumpeting a false success. The same agreement could have been reached nearly two years ago at a lower economic cost. He’s now in the same class as Alexis ...

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• 21 October

  Nestle’s CEO can’t afford any slip ups

  

  Nestle SA Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider is in a good spot. He’s on the verge of capping what he set out to do when he became the Swiss food behemoth’s first outside leader for almost 100 years. Nestle is on track to meet its target for operating margin a year early. Its organic sales growth goal for next year ...

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• 21 October

  S’pore central bankers may know something we don’t

  Singapore offers a small ray of light in a faltering global economy. The country that’s so intimately tied to the rhythms of global commerce dodged a recession in the third quarter, figures Monday showed. Singapore simultaneously eased monetary policy, the first such step since 2016, as anticipated. That it did so cautiously suggests at least some of the doom and ...

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• 21 October

  Chaos at the European Union is all too typical

  Ursula von der Leyen is off to a bad start. The incoming president of the European Commission and her cabinet were supposed to begin working November 1. Instead, the commission will be lucky if it gets sworn in by Christmas. Even then, it may already be damaged goods. The whole process serves as an unsubtle metaphor for a union that ...

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• 21 October

  Trudeau has Canada’s economy humming

  

  Canadians may find the choices in their October 21 national election disheartening. Though there are six candidates, it is essentially a contest between Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party incumbent prime minister who was shamed over the blackface photos of his youth, and the Conservative Party challenger Andrew Scheer, who has been outed as an American citizen. Such a perspective is ...

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• 21 October

  Huawei’s debt bulls scoff at Trump attacks

  

  Blacklisting by the US government, accusations of espionage and the arrest of its chief financial officer haven’t been enough to scare investors away from Huawei Technologies Co. Shares of China’s biggest telecoms equipment and smartphone maker aren’t publicly listed, making its equity largely unavailable to outsiders. Its bonds, however, do trade and have continued their upward trajectory over the past ...

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• 21 October

  A strong US consumer won’t prevent a recession

  

  With the unemployment rate at a 50-year low, the hope is that the US consumer will more than offset an otherwise faltering economy. Don’t bet on it. Clearly, the broad economy is not only weak, but weakening. The yield curve has inverted, with 10-year Treasury note yields falling below two-year yields. Every time that’s happened in the post-war era, a ...

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