August, 2019

• 4 August

  Trump’s fresh China tariffs will affect US consumers

  

  Americans reading gloomy headlines about the trade war with China could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Bloomberg’s consumer comfort index, a weekly phone survey conducted since 1985, is running at its highest levels since 2000. Similar gauges of the household sector, such as the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index and the Conference Board’s various ...

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• 4 August

  The bright spot in smartphone industry

  

  Smartphone sales may be stagnating, but one particular strand of technological wizardry behind them is not. Companies that make the sensors powering your phone’s camera and facial recognition system are preparing for a mini boom. The slowdown in global smartphone sales has made life tougher for semiconductor makers. Chips giants from Qualcomm Inc. to Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have all ...

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• 4 August

  Taxpayers stuck in the middle of Brexit hell

  If you want an unequivocal example of how Brexit has hurt the British taxpayer, look at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Since its record-breaking bail-out in the financial crisis, the Scottish lender has struggled to get back on its feet. It tried shrinking its trading businesses, shedding assets and eliminating costs — only to be stymied by a string ...

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• 4 August

  Fed cannot give markets the certainty they desire

  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell tried to thread the needle between dovish and hawkish at his press conference, but realistically had no hope of pleasing market participants who thought a series of interest-rate cuts were already in the bag. The Fed just isn’t there yet. This reduction in rates was the insurance against bad outcomes. Going forward, conditions will need ...

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• 4 August

  Boris Johnson dreams of a ‘side-deal’ Brexit

  

  Boris Johnson is playing the part of the “madman” negotiator to a tee. The new British prime minister insists he will take his country out of the European Union on October 31 with either a completely new withdrawal deal or none at all — however high the economic cost. With Johnson refusing to even meet his EU counterparts until they ...

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• 4 August

  Hugo Boss suits are out of favour with American consumers

  

  As if the luxury goods industry didn’t have enough to worry about with the troubling developments in its key Asia markets, Hugo Boss AG has raised the specter of things going wrong in America too. The maker of smart suits said that its sales (when excluding currency movements) and earnings growth would be at the lower end of its anticipated ...

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• 4 August

  GDP is just one indicator of many for measuring economy

  

  Every so often you see someone demand that leaders abandon their focus on gross domestic product in favour of other metrics of economic success. Some countries are actually trying to do this; for example, New Zealand just introduced a happiness index (Bhutan did something similar two decades ago). But modifying GDP is probably more trouble than it’s worth. GDP does ...

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• 4 August

  It’s not just Fed and Trump that trouble stock market

  

  Bloomberg In a week when just a few words from Jerome Powell and Donald Trump were enough to send stocks reeling, it’s easy to conclude their pronouncements are all that matter to markets right now. But something else keeps showing it can sway prices: bad earnings. While investors clearly were glued to every word from the central bank and president, ...

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• 4 August

  China set to allow investors to buy shares of tech firms

  

  Bloomberg Chinese authorities proposed rule changes that would for the first time allow local investors to buy shares of some popular technology companies listed in Hong Kong — including, potentially, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The country’s stock exchanges published draft regulations that would bring stocks with different classes of voting rights into the trading links between the mainland and the ...

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• 4 August

  Rates markets ripe for shake up as five Asia central banks meet

  

  Bloomberg This week looms as a key one for Asian financial markets with no less than five central banks set to hand down decisions that may set the tone for the rest of the year. Markets are predicting policy makers in India, the Philippines and New Zealand will all cut interest rates to shore up faltering growth, while those in ...

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