June, 2019

• 30 June

  Euro-area confidence drops to 3-year low

  Bloomberg Euro-area economic confidence declined more than forecast in June, dropping to its lowest level since 2016 as deepening trade tensions and a more cautious outlook for the global economy weigh on business and consumer sentiment. The European Commissi-on’s gauge of sentiment fell to 103.3 points, after 105.2 points in May and below the median forecast of 104.8. That was ...

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• 30 June

  Ford to cut 20% of European workforce in sweeping overhaul

  

  Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. will eliminate about 20 percent of its workforce across Europe in a sweeping overhaul to tackle the carmaker’s falling sales in the region and lift weak profitability. The restructuring, which has been announced piecemeal, will involve reducing its manufacturing footprint in Europe to 18 facilities by the end of 2020 from 24 at the beginning of ...

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• 30 June

  Trump makes history with Kim, revives talks

  

  Bloomberg Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un agreed to restart nuclear talks after an hour-long meeting on Sunday which saw Trump become the first American leader to set foot in North Korea while in office. Trump hailed ties with Kim, whom he has now met three times, and invited him to visit the White House. The meeting was hastily planned after ...

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• 30 June

  Third round of Venezuela talks set to start

  

  Bloomberg A third round of negotiations will be held between representatives of the two men struggling for the leadership of Venezuela, a once-wealthy oil state that has degraded into poverty, starvation and now deep political stalemate. The new round of talks was confirmed by people familiar with the earlier conversations — a tentative effort to clear a path towards an ...

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• 30 June

  Luxembourg minister aims for Swiss-EU pact

  

  Bloomberg Luxembourg’s foreign minister wants Switzerland to redouble its efforts to overcome labour unions’ opposition to a treaty with the European Union, so that it can be finalised this year, according to a newspaper interview. Bern and Brussels are at odds over an agreement to streamline relations, and the impasse has spilled over to stock trading, with the Swiss disallowing ...

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• 30 June

  May is resigning as British PM, and she’s not going quietly

  

  Bloomberg Theresa May will stand down as Britain’s prime minister next month but she is not giving up. With three weeks left before she hands over to someone else, the premier is busier than ever trying to build an ambitious legacy. May flew to Japan for the Group of 20 summit, where she tried to persuade Vladimir Putin to stop ...

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• 30 June

  Vladimir Putin’s domestic comeback isn’t working

  

  Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of routine, and one might have been tempted to ignore his 17th annual call-in show with voters as another pointless set piece. This year, however, the context made it more important than most of the previous ones: Putin, who’s trying to return to pedestrian domestic concerns after a long foray into great-power politics, ...

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• 30 June

  The trade myth Boris Johnson needs

  

  One might have thought that Brexit debate could not be made any more confusing. But the Conservative Party leadership race is doing just that. The obfuscation serves a political purpose. Early this year, Brexiters who are happy for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal latched on to an argument that Britain, once it leaves, can keep ...

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• 30 June

  Huawei’s ties to China’s military aren’t problem

  At first blush, the optics of Huawei Technologies Co. staff working alongside China’s military aren’t great. Company employees teamed up with various organs of the Peoples’ Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors over the past decade, spanning artificial intelligence and radio communications, Bloomberg News reported, citing publicly available documents. Among the joint projects: extracting and classifying emotions in ...

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• 30 June

  Currency wars are easy to start and tough to win

  To President Donald Trump, and any other Group of 20 chief thinking about waging a currency war: It’s basically impossible to win. That’s partly because they don’t really happen in practice. If they did, everybody would lose because everyone would play. The surest way to affect the relative value of an exchange rate is through nudging interest rates up or ...

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