July, 2019

• 13 July

  Thai anti-junta party elects its new leader

  Bloomberg The Pheu Thai Party elected Sompong Amornvivat to lead Thailand’s biggest opposition party into parliament, pledging to keep the coalition government under close scrutiny. Sompong was picked at a special assembly to succeed acting head Viroj Pao-in, who resigned earlier this month. “Our important duty is to scrutinise the workings of the government,” Sompong said in a comment posted ...

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• 13 July

  A blow against AMLO bodes ill for Mexico

  

  After seven months of labouriously convincing the international markets that he can be trusted with the presidency of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador risks seeing all his work undone by tweet. The sudden resignation of Carlos Urzua as his finance minister, and the resignation letter he posted on Twitter are deeply damaging. In combination, they are almost exactly what investors ...

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• 13 July

  HBO and Netflix: From ‘friends’ to foes

  

  Netflix Inc. and the soon-to-come HBO Max app need a little of what each other has. In the meantime, consumers may be the ones who lose out. If you’re like me, you’ve started to realise that despite a vast number of video-streaming apps, none on its own offers the ideal mix of content best suited to your tastes. And if ...

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• 13 July

  Bonds suggest a ceiling for the stock market

  Corporate credit markets have bad news for stock investors. Low yields imply that it’s going to be tough for stocks to rally much further from here. Since equities made what was then an all-time high in January 2018, performance of the stock market has largely tracked the movement of investment-grade corporate bond yields. The rise in yields in 2018 acted ...

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• 13 July

  Donald Trump throws a tax bomb at Macron

  President Donald Trump has been hunting for reasons to extract trade concessions from the European Union with the eagerness of a dog scrabbling around for a bone buried in the back yard. First came Germany’s $24 billion car trade surplus with the US, with Trump coming close to labelling the import of cars made by BMW AG, Mercedes and Volkswagen ...

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• 13 July

  Donald Trump washes his hands of climate change

  

  President Donald Trump has a real thing for cleanliness. As he made clear at an event staged at the White House, this extends far beyond copious use of hand-sanitizer – from sea to sanitary sea, no less. Kicking off his remarks on “America’s Environmental Leadership,” the president spelled out his concerns: From day one, my administration has made it a ...

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• 13 July

  IndiGo can’t fly high with fights in cockpit

  

  The co-founders of India’s No. 1 airline are engaged in a bitter feud. Their quarrel couldn’t have come at a worse time for minority shareholders of InterGlobe Aviation Ltd., the company that owns IndiGo. Investors were just starting to enjoy the fruits of a frenetic expansion that saw the no-frills carrier, Asia’s largest, double its capacity in the three years ...

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• 13 July

  Jerome Powell locked in a July interest-rate cut

  

  Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had a chance to push back against both over-aggressive bond traders and Trump administration officials who were pounding the table for interest-rate cuts. He had the cover of not just a strong rebound in the US labour market but also the backing of regional Fed presidents like Patrick Harker and Loretta Mester, who had already ...

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• 13 July

  Volkswagen, Ford team up on electric, self-driving cars

  

  Bloomberg Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co will cooperate on electric and self-driving car technology, sharing costs on a global scale to take a major step forward in the industry’s disruptive transformation. VW will invest $2.6 billion in Ford’s autonomous-car partner Argo AI in a deal that values the operation at more than $7 billion, the two manufacturers said in ...

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• 13 July

  Spotify unveils new app for ‘slow handsets’ in emerging markets

  

  Bloomberg Spotify Technology SA released a new version of its music streaming app for customers in emerging markets, an effort to grow outside of its strongholds in the US and Europe. The Spotify Lite app, which runs on Android phones, will appeal to users who are limited by data plans and slower networks, the company said in a statement. The ...

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