August, 2019

• 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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• 28 August

  Federal Reserve should not enable Donald Trump

  US President Donald Trump’s trade war with China keeps undermining the confidence of businesses and consumers, worsening the economic outlook. This manufactured disaster-in-the-making presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Should it mitigate the damage by providing offsetting stimulus, or refuse to play along? If the ultimate goal is a healthy economy, the Fed should seriously consider the latter approach. ...

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• 28 August

  India’s Modi gets real on the economic problems

  

  India’s economic numbers have for some time looked better than the facts warranted, feeding an overconfidence in New Delhi about the country’s prospects. Thankfully, that’s begun to change. The Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund, investment banks and ratings agencies have all recently cut their estimates of 2019 growth sharply. While some believe India’s official statistics may overstate ...

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• 28 August

  China’s Meituan joins Amazon’s virtuous circle

  

  Investors celebrating Meituan Dianping’s first quarterly profit have as much reason to cheer how the company got there as the numbers themselves. Surging revenue, market-share gains against rivals such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and success in controlling expenses all helped the Chinese food delivery and bookings provider post net income of 877.4 million yuan ($124 million) versus the 1.57 ...

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• 28 August

  European Union’s migrant policy is lost at sea

  

  In July 2019, more migrants drowned in the Mediterranean than in July 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis — and that despite a dramatically reduced number of arrivals. The 238 deaths are at least partly on the conscience of European politicians; the European Union badly needs a reasonable policy towards the nongovernmental organisations whose rescue ships provide pretty ...

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