June, 2019

• 9 June

  Modi’s key woman needs strongman-handling skills

  Partly by default, and partly by design, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has managed to assemble a newish-looking team for his second term. Hopefully, the freshness will carry over to ideas. The top job in the finance ministry opened up as Arun Jaitley, who held the position during Modi’s first five-year term, made himself unavailable for health reasons. The prime ...

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• 9 June

  Europe needs a smarter kind of fiscal discipline

  The European Union’s (EU) move to discipline Italy for excessive public borrowing poses an awkward question: What use are rules that lack credibility against a member that acts in bad faith? The answer is not much. The EU’s fourth largest economy hasn’t just fallen short of complying with the bloc’s budget rules — its populist government has openly and repeatedly ...

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• 9 June

  After big victory, Indian PM needs to get basics right

  

  When running for reelection, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers stressed that, under his administration, India had become the world’s “fastest-growing large economy.” This was never much of an achievement; after all, the People’s Republic of China was in the midst of a significant slowdown even before the trade war. But even that no longer seems to be ...

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• 9 June

  Traffic jams are a sign of income inequality

  

  The Dutch-based navigation company TomTom NV has discovered in the course of research for its 2018 traffic congestion index that the German cities with the highest and fastest-growing apartment rents are also the most congested. This finding contains an important message for city planners: Instead of trying to fight cars, perhaps it’s worth putting effort into building more housing and ...

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• 9 June

  Google can’t fix its cloud with more acquisitions

  

  Google made another acquisition for its cloud-computing business that competes with Amazon.com Inc. Each deal it does is a reminder of Google’s failures so far in this lucrative field and a potential warning sign to the software specialists that have thrived in the last decade. Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said that it was spending $2.6 billion to buy Looker, ...

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• 9 June

  Two bull markets are dueling over fate of global growth

  

  Bloomberg For all the shine and sophistication, for all the jargon, robots and quants, financial markets are still only this: Buyers buying and sellers selling, times a billion. Behind every trade — perhaps far behind — there is an actual human person. Two, in fact. And because humans disagree a lot, markets do too. And do they ever disagree just ...

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• 9 June

  Mideast stocks rise as traders return to work

  

  Bloomberg Middle East stocks generally advanced on Sunday, catching up with emerging-market peers, as traders returned to work following holidays. Gauges in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Egypt climbed following last week’s increase for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. Stock exchanges in the Arab world were closed for most of last week due to Eid al-Fitr, the holiday ...

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• 9 June

  ‘Yuan breaching 7 per dollar within 3 months’

  Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc expects the yuan to weaken past 7 per dollar in the next three months — a level the currency hasn’t breached in more than a decade. The bank revised its forecasts for the yuan against the dollar because it sees the currency’s decline as a natural offset to higher US tariffs, even if policymakers are ...

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• 9 June

  India eases bad-debt resolution rules

  

  Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) eased rules to give lenders laden with bad debt more time to resolve delinquent accounts and lifted a deadline for pushing defaulters into bankruptcy courts. The directive, which also covers shadow banks, gives lenders 30 days to review a delinquent account and a further 180 days to implement a resolution plan, loosening the ...

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• 9 June

  Blockchain’s appeal limited for retail banks

  

  Bloomberg Retail banks have been slower to embrace blockchain technology and face greater challenges in reaping its potential benefits than their more adventurous co-unterparts in investment-banking world, according to new research from McKinsey & Co. Headwinds for retail lenders to adopt a shared system of distributed computer ledgers to manage day-to-day activities include a tougher regulatory environment for consumer finance ...

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