May, 2019

• 26 May

  Race to succeed UK’s May heats up

  

  Bloomberg The rush is on to replace UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who resigned after failing to deliver on Brexit. Things got more crowded with cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Matt Hancock and former House of Commons leader Andrea Leadsom signalling their intent to run. Gove, the environment secretary and a staunch Brexiteer, is telling colleagues he’s the best person ...

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• 26 May

  Kosovo’s president Thaci seeks to remove border with Albania

  

  Bloomberg Balkan neighbours Albania and Kosovo need to work on greater unity, a goal that will be easier to achieve than Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia, President Hashim Thaci said during a visit to Albania, the Koha Ditore newspaper reported. “We will live in the near future in a joint Kosovo-Albania state,” Thaci said on his visit to Albania, ...

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• 26 May

  Trump downplays Kim’s missile test, revels in Biden insult

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump downplayed a recent missile test by North Korea, a day after his national security adviser called the actions a violation of United Nations resolutions, and took a fresh swing at Democrat Joe Biden, the top 2020 Democratic contender. On Twitter Trump said Pyongyang’s firing of “some small weapons” this month “disturbed some of my people, and ...

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• 26 May

  Trump confronts China’s technology threat head on

  

  Huawei’s name is often translated in English as “Chinese excellence.” The Trump administration embarked on a campaign to rebrand the tech giant, in effect, as a “Chinese threat” and check its expansion in the West. The Huawei assault may be the Trump administration’s most important long-term strategic decision, because it confronts China’s technological challenge to America head on. The goal ...

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• 26 May

  Treat Facebook like big tobacco

  

  People are mad at Facebook — for being too big, too powerful, too omniscient. Last week a co-founder of the company joined the calls from politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren for the government to break up the social media giant. Facebook has repeatedly asked for regulation, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg appealing to the government in a Washington Post op-ed this ...

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• 26 May

  Japan Inc is doing better than people realise

  

  Investors should get used to more big surprises from Japan. The country’s economy grew an annualised 2.1% in the first quarter, defying economists’ expectations for a contraction. The government wasn’t expecting good news: Earlier this month, it moved its provisional assessment of the economy to “worsening” from “weakening” for the first time in six years after an index of economic ...

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• 26 May

  Victorious Modi faces a $1.4 trillion roadblock

  Don’t get your hopes up that India’s infrastructure will start to look like China’s after Narendra Modi’s historic victory. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party made big promises in its election manifesto, among them 100 trillion rupees ($1.4 trillion) of investments in infrastructure by 2024 that would double the length of highways by 2022 and lead to a similar increase in the ...

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• 26 May

  Low-priced airline tickets won’t be around for long

  

  Greta Thunberg probably isn’t a fan of Ryanair Holdings Plc. The 16-year-old Swedish activist took the train to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January to castigate the rich and powerful adults there for failing to tackle the unfolding climate emergency (most of them had arrived by plane). Three months later Ryanair was revealed to be one of Europe’s ...

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• 26 May

  Who is winning the US-China trade war?

  

  With some corners of the market betting the Federal Reserve will cut rates three times this year, you might expect cheers from emerging markets. Not so in Indonesia. Lats week, the central bank was busy defending its currency, placing bids to prop up its government bonds to halt the rupiah’s slide. As the trade war escalates, Jakarta became the first ...

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• 26 May

  The next banking scandals are going to be personal

  

  Since the financial crisis, banking scandals have been expensive; now the attention may turn increasingly personal. After more than $372 billion of fines, significant progress has been made in getting the industry to root out wrongdoing. Just recently, the European Commission fined five companies a total of 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for colluding in the foreign-exchange market. Financial firms, ...

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