July, 2019

• 28 July

  Johnson forms ‘war’ cabinet as prospect of no-deal rises

  

  Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson formed a war cabinet of six senior ministers to plan for exiting the European Union by October 31, as a key adviser said leaving without a deal had become a very real prospect, the Sunday Times reported. Johnson’s most senior aide, Dominic Cummings, a key leader in the 2016 Brexit campaign, called advisers to ...

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• 28 July

  British opposition leader Corbyn says he’s ready for polls

  

  Bloomberg UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he’s ready for a general election at any time as Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to take the country out of the European Union without a deal. “We oppose no deal, and people should have a final say on it,” Corbyn said on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge programme on Sunday. “In the ...

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• 28 July

  US sanctions strand Iran ships in Brazil

  

  Bloomberg US sanctions on Iran are not only reverberating through the oil world, but also the agricultural market in Latin America. At least two Iranian vessels set to carry Brazilian corn are stranded off the Latin American nation’s coast because they can’t get fuel, according to the port authority at Paranagua, about 450 kilometres south of Sao Paulo. State-controlled oil ...

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• 28 July

  ‘Taiwan election a choice between peace or crisis’

  

  Bloomberg Taiwan’s election will be an opportunity for voters to choose cross-strait peace or crisis, said Kaohsiung City Mayor Han Kuo-yu, who was nominated as the presidential nominee by the opposition Kuomintang party at the national congress on Sunday. Han, whose campaign slogan is “Taiwan safe, people rich,” was selected to challenge incumbent Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential poll in ...

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• 28 July

  HK police fire tear gas at protesters in residential area

  

  Bloomberg Hong Kong demonstrators and police clashed for a second straight day as the city’s China-backed government struggles to quell growing discontent and amid violent clashes that have marred the historic movement in recent weeks. Police fired volleys of tear gas at hundreds of black-shirted protesters on Sunday in Sai Ying Pun, a residential and business area where the Chinese ...

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• 28 July

  Johnson’s no-deal Brexit threat won’t sway EU

  

  “They call him Britain Trump!” Such was the US president’s ungrammatical reaction to Boris Johnson’s nomination as the UK’s new prime minister. “They like me over there…He’ll get it done.” If “it” means channelling the fire and the fury of Trump’s hostile rhetoric, without really guaranteeing much in the way of concrete results, this analysis is eerily accurate. What it ...

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• 28 July

  Citi’s $715b moat dares Wall Street

  

  Supply-chain finance is the secret sauce behind Citigroup Inc.’s mid-20percent return on equity from transaction banking. That might sound counterintuitive, especially in Asia. The export-led region is facing the brunt of supply dislocations as the US-China trade war intensifies. But the skirmish isn’t a showstopper for financing. As production moves from one country to another, transactions that need to be ...

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• 28 July

  Why these chipmakers need their own Opec

  You’ve got to feel for the world’s biggest suppliers of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory).Makers of these chips, which temporarily store information in PCs, smartphones and services, endured years of boom-bust profit swings and bruising competition long before the trade war began. The sector finally consolidated into just three companies holding 95percent of global supply of DRAM. And yet earnings stability ...

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• 28 July

  The Fed is becoming more global than ever

  For all the anxiety about America’s retreat from the world, a vital US institution is becoming more global than ever. While the Federal Reserve’s impulse to juice the economy is laudable, it’s worth asking whether this mission creep is sustainable. Or even desirable, over a long horizon. The Fed, whose policymakers meet this week to set interest rates, lacks a ...

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• 28 July

  US firms are not going to bring Asian factories back

  

  President Donald Trump likes to brag that he’s bringing manufacturing back to the US. And indeed, with global trade slowing, the planet-spanning supply chains that have symbolised modern economic globalisation do appear to be contracting. But don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea of “borderless” production as a 1990s fluke. Even if their reach is more limited than before, ...

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