August, 2019

• 28 August

  US-China feud is ruining Christmas for toymakers

  

  Bloomberg Chinese factories are normally at their busiest during the third quarter, cranking out production of everything from Barbie dolls to miniature trucks in time to ship them over the ocean to the US ahead of the all-important holiday shopping season. This year’s different. Even with President Donald Trump delaying tariffs on $160 billion of toys to smartphones to spare ...

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• 28 August

  Queen approves UK’s Johnson plan to suspend parliament

  

  Bloomberg Queen Elizabeth II approved Boris Johnson’s request to suspend parliament for almost five weeks ahead of Brexit. The prime minister’s move sets up a showdown with lawmakers who want to block him from taking the UK out of the European Union without a deal. The pound fell. Privy Council said Queen approved Johnson’s request to prorogue — suspend — ...

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• 28 August

  India top court to review change in Kashmir status

  

  Bloomberg India’s Supreme Court has agreed to examine the constitutional validity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to scrap Kashmir’s autonomy but refused to immediately lift an unprecedented state-wide lockdown on communications and movement. The court’s three-judge panel headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi said a constitution bench comprising five judges will review the legality of abrogating Article ...

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• 28 August

  Duterte to use ‘sea ruling’ to warm China relations

  Bloomberg Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday with a plan to play his ace card — an international ruling that invalidated some of Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea. Duterte said he will use the Philippines’ 2016 internationaltribunal win against China, which he set aside to warm ties and tap Chinese funding, to ...

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• 28 August

  Hong Kong good citizen applications rise as people eye exit

  

  Bloomberg Interest from Hong Kong residents in leaving the city has surged since street protests broke out in the former British colony. About 200 people showed up at a seminar organised by InvestUK, an adviser that helps people secure investor visas to move to the UK from Hong Kong, in July compared with about 40 people usually, according to the ...

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• 28 August

  Cameroon separatists call for lockdown

  

  Bloomberg Separatists in Cameroon called for a lockdown in the country’s Anglophone regions after a weekend of unrest in which at least 40 people reportedly died. The call for a lockdown came a week after a military tribunal jailed 10 rebel leaders including Julius Ayuk Tabe, the self-proclaimed president of the area that separatists have labeled Ambazonia, on charges including ...

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• 28 August

  Tanzania agrees to return Burundi refugees home

  

  Bloomberg Tanzania agreed to repatriate Burundian refugees who have been sheltering in two major settlements, the Burundian Interior Minister Pascal Barandagiye told the national broadcaster. Tanzania estimates it has more than 220,000 Burundian refugees who fled from its northwestern neighbour during a political crisis that began in 2015. “There is no reason for refugees to stay in Tanzania” while their ...

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• 28 August

  The French are now doing better than the Germans

  

  We’ve become so gloomy about the euro zone that it’s easy to neglect the bright spots. After a very tough 2018 for President Emmanuel Macron, France, the second-largest economy in the monetary union, is faring much better than most experts would have assumed. Its economic model — less reliant on exports than Germany — is proving mo-re resilient to dangers ...

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• 28 August

  Someone blew a hole in Volcker Rule

  

  Up to now, President Donald Trump’s largely ill-conceived effort to roll back financial regulation had one redeeming feature: a mostly sensible plan to improve the Volcker Rule, a piece of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act aimed at limiting banks’ ability to take undue risks with taxpayer backing. Not anymore. A new round of tweaks, which regulators are in the process of ...

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• 28 August

  For currency traders, August was no day at the beach

  Emerging-market currencies are having their worst month since May 2016. To confound matters, some of the usual rules of investing have broken down. When the global economic outlook is dimming, traders often sell currencies of small, open, trade-reliant economies — say, South Korea’s won — and cling to higher-yielding assets. This is driven by the so-called carry trade, when investors ...

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