October, 2019

• 12 October

  Thailand economy is being too good

  

  Thailand really should let its hair down. The currency is strong and the current-account surplus is big versus the neighbourhood, while there’s a lot of scope for fiscal expansion. The Bank of Thailand has been grudging in cutting interest rates, in contrast to the easing party under way not just in Asia but in emerging and developed markets the world ...

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• 12 October

  GE’s latest casualty is pension promises

  General Electric Co. employees are still paying the price for the company’s mistakes. The industrial conglomerate announced that it will freeze US pension benefits for approximately 20,000 salaried employees and supplemental payouts for 700 executives. They’ll get to keep the benefits they’ve already accrued, and a plan to prefund an additional $4 billion to $5 billion of those obligations helps ...

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• 12 October

  Trump, Putin both hate the European cheese

  US President Donald Trump is known to admire his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That doesn’t mean, however, that he should imitate some of Putin’s least effective policies – such as declaring war on European cheese. In the US, a 25% tariff on cheese imported from the European Union kicks in on October 18. In 2014, Russia banned EU cheese, and ...

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• 12 October

  Central banks can’t create negative rates by themselves

  

  It’s been a decade since the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and yet here we are in a world where the highest government bond yield starts with the number “2.” Among the world’s major developed economies, only the English speaking countries – the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – still have monetary policy rates above zero. ...

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• 12 October

  UK’s PizzaExpress is about to be sliced up

  

  A troubled British consumer brand with an illustrious past. Too much debt. A big Chinese investor. Sound familiar? Pizza Express Ltd., which is preparing for debt talks with creditors, is being compared to Thomas Cook Group Plc, the travel operator that collapsed last month. The 54-year-old restaurant chain isn’t in as precarious a state as Thomas Cook was for much ...

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• 12 October

  India’s quashed bank merger fans contagion risks

  

  The contagion risk from India’s year-old shadow banking crisis has suddenly turned much graver. What investors don’t know yet is whether the new problem is a $4 billion headache, a $16 billion migraine, or a life-threatening tumor. On October 9, the Reserve Bank of India quashed a proposed merger of Indiabulls Housing Finance Ltd., one of the country’s largest real-estate ...

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• 12 October

  Samsung is pouring $11b into ‘displays’

  

  Bloomberg Samsung Display Co plans to spend 13.1 trillion won ($11 billion) developing and building next-generation displays, responding to a flood of supply and price pressure from fast-moving Chinese rivals. In an announcement event attended by Korean President Moon Jae-in and Samsung Electronics Co Vice-Chairman Lee Jae-yong, the investment was presented as a move to reorganise the display industry while ...

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• 12 October

  Consumer Reports calls Tesla Smart Summon feature ‘glitchy’

  

  Bloomberg Tesla Inc’s Smart Summon, the semi-autonomous feature some owners can use to fetch their cars, doesn’t live up to the Model 3 maker’s marketing hype, Consumer Reports magazine said. The magazine spent several days testing the feature, which allows Tesla owners to tap their smartphone and remotely call for their car to pick them up. Tesla customers have flooded ...

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• 12 October

  Sony plans to launch PlayStation 5 in 2020

  Bloomberg Sony Corp’s highly anticipated next-generation PlayStation will go on sale in time for the holiday season next year. The PlayStation 5 will come with a high-speed solid state drive, Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices Inc, 8K resolution video and a unit for processing 3D audio, the company said in a release. The new gaming ...

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• 12 October

  US regulators want to know if cameras can replace car mirrors

  

  Bloomberg Drivers in the US may one day no longer have to crane their necks to check their blind spots if regulators agree to let high-tech cameras and screens replace the humble side-view mirror. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in a notice that is seeking public and industry input on whether to allow so-called camera monitoring systems ...

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