July, 2019

• 29 July

  Iran sees no ‘sincerity’ in Pompeo’s offer for talks

  Bloomberg Iran doesn’t think the US is seeking talks or an agreement with the Islamic republic, Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, said days after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo expressed willingness to travel to Tehran to address the Iranian people. This is a “defensive move” by American officials in response to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad ...

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• 29 July

  Top defector tells of spying and mutiny in Venezuela

  

  Bloomberg Days after being named chief of Venezuela’s feared SEBIN intelligence agency last fall, General Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera was called in by President Nicolas Maduro and asked where the enemy was. “I don’t understand the question, sir,” Figuera says he responded. “I want a report every two hours of what the political opposition is doing,” Maduro replied, listing some ...

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• 29 July

  The Fed’s dreary choices

  

  It’s a done deal. Almost everyone, or so it seems, believes the Federal Reserve will cut short-term interest rates at next meeting when its main decision-making body meets. President Trump favours lower rates. So do many economists, including some fierce Trump critics. Similarly, Fed Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell says the Fed wants to sustain the economic expansion. Finally, Wall Street ...

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• 29 July

  For UBS, new normal is new painful

  

  After a horrid start to the year, UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti finally got some relief. Switzerland’s biggest bank posted its best second quarter results under his watch. Unfortunately, the likelihood that the stars will remain aligned is remote. At $1.4 billion, net income in the three months through June was the highest since 2010, comfortably beating ...

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• 29 July

  Nokia’s CEO shows you can climb out of abyss

  Nokia Oyj started as a single paper mill in 1865. In recent years, it’s the stock that has been through the mill, as the maker of telecommunications equipment has ebbed and soared with each burst of spending on next generation mobile networks. Chief Executive Officer Rajeev Suri has steadily toiled away to drag the Espoo, Finland-based company through to the ...

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• 29 July

  Donald Trump’s assault has not killed Huawei

  Things aren’t so desperate for Huawei Technologies Co. after all.Just over a month ago we were told that the Chinese electronics giant was hunkering down for a drop of as much as 60 million units in overseas handset shipments this year. That was quite a blow, I wrote at the time, considering that consumer devices accounted for 45 percent of ...

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• 29 July

  Germany should just drop NATO’s 2% spending goal

  

  Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the likely successor of Chancellor Angela Merkel, took over as Germany’s defense minister. In a speech to parliament outlining her priorities, AKK, as she is known, said she would “hold fast” to the goal of increasing country’s defense spending to 2 percent of economic output — but that Germany would aim to attain military spending of 1.5 percent ...

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• 29 July

  Boeing’s 737 Max timetable for return remains a guesswork

  

  When will Boeing Co.’s 737 Max return to the skies? It’s anybody’s guess. The aerospace giant said that it was planning for an early fourth-quarter return for the jet, giving investors hope that it had turned the corner on the crisis that’s engulfed the best-selling plane following two fatal crashes. But in the earnings call, executives threw out an alternative ...

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• 29 July

  Facebook balances rise and fall of a shifting empire

  

  One of the toughest corporate strategies is managing a declining asset while investing in promising but nascent ones. It’s such a well-known difficulty that famous books have been written about it. This management balancing act might be even tougher in technology. If a company has a slow-growing or declining tech asset, often it simply dies or gets taken over by ...

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• 29 July

  Ryanair clings to profit outlook amid Max grounding, fare war

  

  Bloomberg Ryanair Holdings Plc clung to its full-year earnings outlook as a fare war and the grounding of Boeing Co’s 737 Max jetliner ate into first-quarter profit at Europe’s biggest discount airline. Margins on ticket sales are shrinking, with a glut of seats hurting prices in Germany and concerns around Brexit weighing on UK demand, Ryanair said. At the same ...

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