April, 2019

• 1 April

  China bad debt is a $300b value trap

  

  There’s plenty of bad debt to go around for investors in distressed assets in China. The question is how to extract value from them. For years, Chinese banks shoveled nonperforming loans to asset managers set up by the government, which sought to get back what they could while warehousing what was irrecoverable. Now, as commercial lenders try to shift record ...

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• 1 April

  China’s Huawei is more vulnerable to hacks

  Huawei Technologies Co.’s telecommunications equipment isn’t just vulnerable to Chinese state hacking. It’s susceptible to attacks from plenty of others besides. That was a key finding in the annual report from Britain’s Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board, the body that ensures gear from the Chinese firm in the nation’s telecommunications network is up to scratch. These findings are ...

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• 1 April

  Sterling is trapped in Brexit tractor beam

  Prime Minister Theresa May’s failed attempt last week– her third – to get her Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament pushed sterling to its lowest level for three weeks. But take a step back and the currency is not only still stuck in the same narrow range it has occupied for nearly three years, it has barely budged for the last 12 ...

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• 1 April

  Europe should do more than ban plastic forks

  

  The European Union (EU) is close to outlawing some single-use plastic products, such as cutlery, straws, coffee stirrers and cotton swab sticks – but the measures are too narrow and too lenient towards producers to have a meaningful benefit for the environment. The EU, as one of the biggest producers and the biggest exporter of plastic waste, should do better ...

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• 1 April

  High risk no answer to negative yields

  

  For bond investors, there’s something inherently offensive about negative-yielding debt, even though it’s nothing new by now. Conceptually, buying a security that effectively guarantees a loss if held to maturity goes against the core purpose of fixed-income investing — preserving principal and earning steady interest payments that exceed the inflation rate. Across the globe, the amount of debt with negative ...

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• 1 April

  Tech IPOs aren’t the milestones they once were

  

  On March 28, Lyft Inc. sold its first batch of stock as a public company. It’s a milestone for the on-demand transportation company, and it kicks off the great tech unicorn IPO barrage of 2019. Depending on your perspective, this flood is either validation for the class of companies created since smartphones and cloud computing made new technology businesses possible ...

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• 1 April

  BOJ should avoid deepening negative rates: Takashima

  

  Bloomberg The new head of Japan’s main banking lobby warned the central bank against deepening negative interest rates, signalling such a move could spur risky investment and put further pressure on lenders’ profits. “It will be a quite difficult option to take,” Makoto Takashima, chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association, said in an interview. “Simply speaking, that would cause policy ...

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• 1 April

  Support needed amid soft inflation, says ECB

  

  Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) officials pressed the case for continued monetary-policy support as they signalled the euro-area economic slowdown is weighing on inflation. In a foreword to the ECB’s annual report, President Mario Draghi warned of a “persistence of uncertainties” and said there’s a continued need for stimulus to boost inflation. His vice president, Luis de Guindos echoed that, ...

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• 1 April

  Perella hires Goldman restructuring bankers

  Bloomberg Perella Weinberg Partners LP is hiring Clinton Ray and Guy Morgan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc to expand its European restructuring business, according to people familiar with the matter. The bankers will join the firm in London in June to advise new and existing clients on restructuring, debt advisory and liability management, said the people, who asked not to ...

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• 1 April

  Swedbank criminal probe intensifies

  

  Bloomberg A criminal probe tied to money laundering allegations engulfing Swedbank AB drew sharp recriminations from both sides over the weekend, and raised serious questions about the role of the board. After the prosecutor accused Sweden’s biggest mortgage bank of refusing to hand over key information, Swedbank’s lawyers responded with claims that investigators were ignoring the norms of Swedish law. ...

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