June, 2019

• 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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• 30 June

  Air conditioning is the world’s next big threat

  

  The vast majority of Americans have air conditioning but in Germany almost nobody does. At least not yet. So when temperatures in Berlin rose to an uncomfortable 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) this week – a record for the month of June – I was uncommonly delighted to go to the Bloomberg office, where it’s artificially and blissfully cool. By letting ...

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• 30 June

  Hong Kong banks’ biggest threat could end up saving them

  

  In a poor, underbanked country, there wouldn’t be anything unusual about imposing a $6.40–a-month penalty on depositors unable to keep at least $640 in their savings accounts. That’s just how financial exclusion works. But in rich Hong Kong, a city that gives banks more than $26 billion in annual earnings, it took a fintech revolution to make HSBC Holdings Plc ...

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• 30 June

  The unbanked don’t need Facebook’s money

  

  Among Facebook Inc.’s justifications for introducing a new digital currency, Libra, the company has offered one pious rationale: to connect the 1.7 billion adults who lack bank accounts to the global financial system. That’s certainly one way for the “unbanked” to enjoy the convenience of digital money. Or they could just use a DeathAdder Elite. The DeathAdder is, of course, ...

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