July, 2019

• 20 July

  Apollo 11’s achievement continues to fascinate

  

  Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O’Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  India’s insolvency law changes are needed

  

  At last, India’s in-court bankruptcies will show some urgency and common sense. The government said it would amend the 2016 insolvency law, a signature reform of Prime Minister NarendraModi’s first term. Investors will cheer. The legislation was getting mired in frustrating legal delays and bizarre judgments, threatening to scare off global investors from a $200-billion-plus bad-debt cleanup. The last straw ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  South Korea rate cut can’t overcome trade war

  Asia’s most stubborn central bank just reversed course. With the Federal Reserve all but certain to renew its easing cycle at the end of the month, the Bank of Korea preemptively cut its benchmark interest rate to 1.5 percent from 1.75 percent, in a decision that surprised roughly half of the economists polled by Bloomberg. The central bank aimed to ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Merkel, Macron got von der Leyen elected, barely

  Ursula von der Leyen has clinched the presidency of the European Commission with a razor-thin margin of nine votes. It’s a win for the national governments that backed her, a loss for the European Parliament that dreamed of putting forward one of its own — and a sign of some very tough tussles ahead for the 28-member bloc. When pulling ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo can’t escape from Fed hold

  

  Heading into this earnings cycle for the biggest US banks, analysts were already plenty worried about net interest income, which is how much the firms make from customers’ loan payments compared with what they pay on deposits. After all, long-term interest rates have plummeted since the end of last year amid signs of slowing global growth and the Federal Reserve ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Ericsson blames analysts for disappointing profit

  

  It was similar to the maligned film director who says, “My movie isn’t bad, the audience just isn’t smart enough to understand it.” Except this time it was the chief executive of a $30 billion telecoms equipment firm talking about his quarterly earnings. Ericsson AB’s adjusted operating profit hit 3.9 billion kronor ($415 million) in the three months to June, ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Inequality is not what’s making people mad

  

  Do people really care about income inequality? Or when they use the term, are they really thinking about something else? You would certainly think from the US political debate that Americans want to close the rich-poor wage gap. In 2013, President Barack Obama famously asserted that inequality is “the defining issue of our time.” Or take Senator Elizab- eth Warren, ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Wing unveils air traffic control app for drones

  

  Bloomberg The company that brought you free digital maps and email wants to do the same thing for your drone. Wing LLC, an offshoot of Alphabet Inc’s Google, unveiled a new app it calls OpenSky that it hopes will become the basis for a full-fledged air-traffic control system to manage the expected growth of this new class of flying devices. ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Toyota’s $2b pledge revs up Indonesia electric car push

  

  Bloomberg Toyota Motor Corp will lead $3.6 billion in investments that global carmakers have pledged to plow into Indonesia’s electric-vehicle programme in the next five years, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto said. The Japanese carmaker’s commitment — it plans to spend $2 billion to build hybrid vehicle plants in Southeast Asia’s largest car market — will help the country triple its ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Tencent, BMW team up on self-driving cars

  Bloomberg Tech-giant Tencent Holdings will partner with BMW to help develop self-driving vehicles in China. The pair began collaborating on what they called BMW Group China High Performance D3 Platform, which is scheduled to begin operations by the end of the year. Tencent operates one of the largest cloud platforms in China, providing services from data storage to online computing. ...

  Read More »