April, 2019

• 15 April

  Murder drove Caputova to presidency, unifying mission

  

  Bloomberg When a colleague from Zuzana Caputova’s little-known political party suggested she run for president last year, she thought the idea absurd. But then the murder of a journalist friend — an act that launched Slovakia’s biggest protests since the fall of communism — made it personal. The former NGO lawyer ran and won by a landslide, and now she’s ...

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• 15 April

  What really caused the financial crisis?

  

  It is astonishing that, even though the global financial crisis occurred a decade ago, we do not yet have a clear and convincing explanation of its basic cause. To be sure, theories abound. Liberals blame Wall Street greed and lax government oversight. The conservatives’ villain is the government’s aggressive promotion of homeownership, which flooded the economy with bad mortgages. Although ...

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• 15 April

  Tesla’s growth story needs a new charge

  

  Tesla Inc.’s stock is back in its $260-$270 hot-zone again April 11, falling on news that a key supplier is taking things down a notch. Panasonic Corp. and Tesla are reportedly “tempering expansion plans” at the Gigafactory, the giant facility in Nevada that produces battery packs for the electric vehicle-maker. Panasonic supplies batteries and has invested heavily in the plant, ...

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• 15 April

  Two cheers for Norway’s renewable energy push

  After several years of lobbying, Norway’s $1 trillion wealth fund has persuaded the government that it would be a good thing to invest some of the country’s nest egg in unlisted renewable energy infrastructure projects. But the amount involved is paltry, given both the scale of the world’s climate-change challenge and the potential investment opportunities likely to be available to ...

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• 15 April

  The Brexit pause gives Britain one last chance

  Pushing Britain’s deadline for exit from the European Union (EU) to the end of October answers none of the questions that have been torturing the country for three years. The new schedule removes the immediate risk of an unintended no-deal Brexit, which would otherwise have occurred. That’s something. But it sheds no light on what needs to happen instead. Fatigue with ...

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• 15 April

  Japan is an example for other developed nations

  

  As Japan’s emperor Akihito prepares to abdicate, what’s known as the Heisei period — January 8, 1989, through April 30, 2019 — draws to a close. Those 30 years will forever be associated with the spectacular asset bubble that burst right at the beginning, and the economic lost decade that followed. Heisei was also when Japan’s population peaked and started ...

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• 15 April

  Electric car price shrinks along with battery cost

  

  Every year, BloombergNEF’s advanced transport team builds a bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle (EV) and compares it to cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of same size. The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market. All things being equal, upfront price ...

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• 15 April

  Next plane you board may rely on 3D printers

  

  Like the cotton gin and the modern assembly line, 3D printing is the kind of breakthrough advancement that holds the promise to revolutionise manufacturing. The technology lets companies input designs into a printer the size of a small garden shed and have it spit out fully formed, usable products or parts – often at a savings of time, manpower and ...

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• 15 April

  US stocks slip as earnings disappoint; crude slides

  

  Bloomberg US stocks slipped as the latest results from major banks disappointed. Treasuries were little changed with the dollar. The S&P 500 Index halted a three-day advance as Goldman Sachs Group Inc retreated after missing estimates for sales and trading revenue. Citigroup Inc was little changed after its revenue matched expectations. The benchmark for American equities is near a six-month ...

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• 15 April

  Sensex rebounds from weekly fall on results

  

  Bloomberg Indian equities rose, with key indexes rebounding from a weekly decline, on better-than-expected earnings at the nation’s biggest software exporter and a weather office outlook that predicted a near-normal rainfall this year. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex gained 0.4 percent to 38,905.84 in Mumbai, more than recouping last week’s 0.2 percent decline, its first weekly drop in eight. The ...

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