June, 2019

• 10 June

  Macron is Salvini’s best friend really

  

  Emmanuel Macron has marked out Matteo Salvini as his arch-nemesis in the fight against Europe’s far right. But his own actions are playing right into the hands of the most powerful person in Italian politics. The French president is preaching a pan-European agenda abroad, as he tries to win around Germany and other countries to his dreams for a more ...

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• 10 June

  India, the world’s model central bank? Just maybe

  India is becoming the gold standard for monetary policy in Asia, if not the world. While global markets are giddy from hints that the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates, India’s central bank has been easing since February. Just as important, the Reserve Bank of India has been very consistent in its message: Borrowing costs need to come down to ...

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• 10 June

  Declaring war on Silicon Valley won’t help anyone

  Across the federal government, the knives are officially out for big technology companies. Avoiding a bloodbath should be a priority. As Bloomberg News reported, the House Judiciary Committee is gearing up to investigate unfair business practices by platform companies, while the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have divvied up Silicon Valley’s big four — Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook ...

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• 10 June

  Merkel’s succession is no longer looking secure

  

  After the relatively weak performance of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the European Parliament election, the party’s leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is in trouble. There is a fear in the party that Chancellor Angela Merkel has messed up her succession, and Bloomberg News has even reported that Merkel herself doubts whether AKK, as she is known, is up to ...

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• 10 June

  Stop blaming trade war for everything

  

  The trade war needs to fire its PR team. The tussle between the US and China is being blamed for all manner of economic and financial developments. Some of these are only vaguely related to the tariff spat, or they reflect trends underway before US President Donald Trump ever heard of his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. In other areas, like ...

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• 10 June

  India going cashless could be a model for the world

  

  India aims to curb cash – but this time it wants to do it properly. A cashless society wasn’t the original goal of the country’s draconian currency ban in November 2016. But when an acute shortage of banknotes gave a fillip to digital wallets, that purpose was added as an afterthought to justify an act of farcical state overreach. The ...

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• 10 June

  BOJ has enough ammunition, wary of side effects: Kuroda

  

  Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) can deliver bigger monetary stimulus if necessary, but needs to take care with its side effects on the financial system, said Governor Haruhiko Kuroda. The BOJ will ease further if momentum towards its 2 percent inflation target is lost, Kuroda said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Kathleen Hays in Fukuoka, Japan, where central ...

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• 10 June

  Growth pangs put more rate cuts on radar in India

  

  Bloomberg A marked slowdown in Asia’s third-largest economy pushed growth concerns to the top of the Reserve Bank of India’s agenda, suggesting more policy easing will follow its third interest-rate cut of the year. Governor Shaktikanta Das and the inflation-targeting RBI he leads is now squarely focussed on boosting investment and consumption after quarterly growth cooled to a five-year low ...

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• 10 June

  No specific yuan level important: Yi Gang

  

  Bloomberg People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang said that no specific level for the yuan is important, and indicated confidence it will continue to be “relatively strong” once the noise of the trade war subsides. “There is obviously a link between the trade war and the movements of renminbi,” Yi said in an exclusive interview in Beijing, using the ...

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• 10 June

  Chile stuns market with a half-point rate cut

  Bloomberg Chile’s central bank stunned analysts by cutting its key interest rate by 50 basis points, the biggest reduction in a decade, saying the economy could grow faster without fuelling inflation. Policy makers reduced the benchmark rate to 2.5 percent, surprising all 18 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The analysts had expected borrowing costs to be left unchanged. The bank is ...

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