August, 2019

• 26 August

  Trump strikes conciliatory tone on Iran, blessing Zarif G-7 trip

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump said he knew that Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was heading to Biarritz, site of the Group of Seven summit, and supported French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to invite him amid growing signs of active diplomacy at work. The US leader pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, leaving Macron and his European allies ...

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• 26 August

  HK violence: China mulls army intervention

  

  Bloomberg Chinese state media gave one of its strongest warnings yet of a possible military intervention in Hong Kong, even though analysts said such a move remained a last resort. The unsigned commentary from the official Xinhua News Agency on Sunday came after the 12th straight weekend of unrest in Asia’s main financial hub, with violent clashes that saw demonstrators ...

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• 26 August

  Italy coalition talks stall as time short to avoid polls

  

  Bloomberg Attempts to avoid a snap election in Italy are now riding on the future of caretaker Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, as a deadline to reach a deal nears. Whether or not Conte stays in his job to lead a new alliance has become the main sticking point in talks between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic ...

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• 26 August

  The great deficit gamble

  

  It’s getting harder and harder to write these budget columns, because it must be obvious to almost everyone by now that hardly anyone in Washington (or perh-aps any place) cares ab-out the budget deficits. The assumption is that we can raise spending and cut taxes forever — or until some crisis occurs that forces us to do involuntarily what we ...

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• 26 August

  The European Union’s next bad idea

  

  If you are searching for the EU’s next bad idea, look no further than the “European Future Fund.” The 100 billion euro ($110 billion) pot, first reported in Politico, would be a way to boost strategic sectors which are seen as lagging behind China and the US. It’s not a formal policy plan, and the details are still scanty. But ...

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• 26 August

  Headed to recession? Keep an eye on business investment

  The growing consensus is that even with all the trade tensions wreaking havoc in markets and global supply chains, as long as consumers stay resilient, the US will probably avoid recession. But a big enough decline in business investment —prompted by trade tensions and global manufacturing weakness — could be enough to create layoffs and dent consumption. So that’s the ...

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• 26 August

  At G7, Donald Trump is one of the popular ones

  Donald Trump is an unpopular president. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, only 43.3 percent of Americans approve of his performance. FiveThirtyEight, which weights polls by quality, sample size and partisan lean, puts the average at 41.6 percent. But as the president meets with leaders of the other G7 countries in the French resort city of Biarritz, he ...

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• 26 August

  Trump’s trade war could be fuelling Amazon fires

  

  The fires currently consuming Brazil’s Amazon rainforest seem a world away from the tense diplomacy in the US trade war with China. In truth, they’re more closely connected than you might suspect. One of Beijing’s main acts of retaliation in the fight has been to freeze purchases of the 30 million metric tons to 40 million tons of American soybeans ...

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• 26 August

  Things aren’t looking up at Nordstrom

  

  Who knew the work of disciplined inventory and expense management could get Wall Street this excited? Or, at least that’s what I think is driving a surge in shares of Nordstrom Inc., which reported second-quarter earnings. The retailer beat analysts’ earnings per share estimates, an outcome it chalked up to deft expense control. But, to my mind, practically everything else ...

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• 26 August

  Latin America reckons with a fish-farming boom

  

  When he failed to ignite a continental uprising against South America’s 19th-century colonial masters, Simon Bolivar was crestfallen. “He who serves the revolution plows the seas,” he despaired. Happily, Bolivar got it backward. From the Yucatan Peninsula to the Strait of Magellan, aquaculture is revolutionising food production. Plowing the oceans and inland waters, Latin America and the Caribbean expanded more ...

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