July, 2019

• 23 July

  Pound slips over Johnson’s victory

  

  Bloomberg The pound slipped on concern the UK may leave the European Union without a divorce deal after members of the Conservative party voted for Boris Johnson to be the next prime minister. Sterling fell for a third day after Johnson, who has vowed to march the UK out of the EU with or without a deal by October 31, ...

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• 23 July

  Let’s choose the best person to lead the IMF

  

  Now that Christine Lagarde has announ-ced her resignation as managing director of the International Monetary Fu-nd, German chancellor Angela Merkel says Europeans “again” have a “claim” to fill what is arguably the world’s most important economic job. Merkel is invoking a decades-old political deal, which gives Europe the IMF leadership in return for allowing Americans to run the World Bank. ...

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• 23 July

  Get ready for more Chinese defaults

  

  China’s bond market has been eerily quiet lately. Over the past year, investors in China’s US dollar bonds had gotten used to the idea of defaults. As early as 2015, the government started allowing some state-owned enterprises to renege on their commitments, a painful but welcome step that helps differentiate healthy firms and troubled ones. But there hadn’t been a ...

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• 23 July

  Novartis’s ‘pure pharma’ play works, at least for now

  Slimming down appears to be paying off for Novartis AG. CEO Vas Narasimhan has refocussed the Swiss pharma giant around drugs by selling off eye-care business Alcon and its remaining consumer-health inte- rests. Second-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations and a big guidance boost showed the benefits of the strategy. Shares hit an all-time high in early trading even ...

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• 23 July

  Why the Fed should not deliver a big rate cut

  What’s wrong with a 50 basis-point interest-rate cut? I’m all for central banks doing their utmost to support high, durable and inclusive growth. But this doesn’t mean throwing everything at the wall when the economy is doing relatively well, financial markets are buoyant, and policy ammunition is limited. Growing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 50 ...

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• 23 July

  Will the global debt bomb explode again; just wait

  

  Debt is the crux of the matter. If you want to understand what makes the world vulnerable to a global recession or, possibly, something much worse, you’ve got to come to grips with the worldwide debt buildup. It’s not the only candidate for calamity, but it ranks first among the possibilities. At the end of March, worldwide debt totalled $246.5 ...

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• 23 July

  Cars become place for passengers’ private moments

  

  Volkswagen AG announced that 2019 would be the last model year the Golf SportWagen and Alltrack, the automaker’s station wagons, will be produced for the US. The German company has sold wagons in the US since 1966, starting with the Type 3 “Squareback” model. “Customers are speaking clearly about their preferences — it’s an SUV world now,” the company said ...

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• 23 July

  Money doesn’t deserve the bad rap it’s getting

  

  Money gets a bad rap. In the current environment, amid inequality not seen since the 1920s, too many people find it too easy to disparage wealth and the quest for material goods. There is no doubt that lifestyle creep and the hedonic treadmill are not the paths to true happiness. But what we see today is a backlash caused, in ...

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• 23 July

  UBS’s chief sees hurdles multiplying after rebound

  

  Bloomberg UBS Group AG rebounded from one of the worst environments in recent history, but CEO Sergio Ermotti is still facing no shortage of challenges. Pressure on investment banking revenue, the prospect of fresh rate cuts and the struggle to meet profit targets are all weighing on the bank after it posted the best quarterly net income in almost a decade. ...

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• 23 July

  PBOC: Interest rate level is appropriate

  

  Bloomberg China’s central bank governor said the country’s current interest rates are at an appropriate level and the bank will make decisions on interest rates based domestic considerations. China didn’t follow the Federal Reserve in raising interest rates last year, and it’ll continue to “look at its own real situation” when making rate decisions now that the Fed is likely ...

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