July, 2019

• 14 July

  Prime Day becomes holiday testing ground for toymakers

  

  Bloomberg It hasn’t replaced Christmas, but Amazon’s Prime Day is becoming a holiday testing ground for toy companies. Toymakers including Mattel Inc and MGA Entertainment Inc are using the e-commerce giant’s annual sales event to roll out new products and learn more about customers ahead of the critical holiday season. For the first time, Mattel is gearing up for a ...

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• 14 July

  Barneys New York weighs bankruptcy

  Bloomberg Luxury department store Barneys New York is considering a bankruptcy filing, Reuters reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The retailer is working with Kirkland & Ellis LLP to prepare for a potential bankruptcy that could come in the coming weeks, Reuters cited one of the people as saying. Barneys has not yet made a final decision and ...

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• 14 July

  Walmart e-comm unit seeks new exec while losses pile up

  

  Bloomberg Walmart Inc has a hole to fill at its online unit, and whoever assumes the role faces a big challenge ahead. The company is searching for a new chief revenue officer for its US e-commerce business, who would work under online leader Marc Lore to help map out its battle plan against Amazon.com Inc, Target Corp and other rivals. ...

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• 14 July

  Trump has a favourite currency; it’s not bitcoin

  

  When Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, praised bitcoin last year as “disruptive populism“ and revealed he was working on his own cryptocurrency, it was evidence of something many people had long suspected: The forces driving the growth of anarchic, get-rich-quick digital tokens are very similar to those buoying Trump and his imitators. Both are born out of a resentment ...

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• 14 July

  Trade-off between jobs, inflation fades

  

  Earlier this week Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenged Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on whether something known as the Phillips curve — the hypothetical inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation — is “no longer describing what is happening in today’s economy.” In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, presidential economic adviser Larry Kudlow agreed. Ocasio-Cortez is probably concerned about wages. Although ...

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• 14 July

  You cannot gauge global economy looking at ships

  Amid the turmoil of the oil-price bubble and credit crunch in 2008, a few analysts and economists discovered something remarkable. An obscure shipping index compiled in the shadow of London’s “Gherkin” tower had become a sort of daily prophecy about the direction of the global economy. The Baltic Dry Index could be used as a ”Predictor of Global Stock Returns, ...

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• 14 July

  Plant a trillion trees, but don’t stop there

  It’s easy to criticise just about any proposed climate change solution as not effective enough. The buildup of greenhouse gases is simply too big of a problem to be solved by one course of action alone, whether it’s increasing the use of solar energy or giving up beef orcapturing carbon from the atmosphere. A recent estimate that planting lots of ...

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• 14 July

  The path forward with North Korea: ‘Denuclearisation lite’

  

  Over the past couple of weeks, there have been increasing signs that the Trump administration — and particularly the president himself — is moderating its position on North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Gone are the adamant statements that the US will only accept complete, immediate and irreversible denuclearisation. Instead, we’ve seen a symbolic but historic meeting between Trump and ...

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• 14 July

  Lagarde’s ECB top team is running out of economists

  

  Christine Lagarde’s nomination as president of the European Central Bank (ECB) has sparked controversy over whether she’ll be up to the job. But there’s another position to fill at the top of the ECB that’s nearly as important. Benoit Coeure, a member of the bank’s six-strong executive board, will leave at the end of December after serving an eight-year term. ...

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• 14 July

  Beware of geeks bearing artificial intelligence gifts

  

  Last March, McDonald’s Corp acquired the startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million, in the hope of employing machine learning to personalise customer experience. In the age of artificial intelligence, this was a no-brainer for McDonald’s, since Dynamic Yield is widely recognised for its AI-powered technology and recently even landed a spot in a prestigious list of top AI startups. Trouble ...

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