March, 2019

• 12 March

  Slashing tariffs won’t redeem a no-deal Brexit

  

  Fast-forward past next week’s critical Brexit votes in the UK parliament. If Britain ends up leaving the European Union (EU) without a deal, it will have to set its own independent trade policy for the first time in a generation. How would it mitigate the trade frictions it will face outside the bloc? Brexit supporters have a beguiling answer: eliminate ...

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• 12 March

  China may outrun US next year…

  

  Remember when Japan was going to become the world’s biggest economy? Don’t laugh. Herman Kahn, the Rand Corp. futurist who partly inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove, predicted as far back as 1970 that Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) would overtake the US around the year 2000. Decades later, his prediction still seemed on track. Thanks in part to strength ...

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• 12 March

  NSA program fizzles out, yet world keeps turning

  Do you remember the National Security Agency (NSA’s) phone-records program? It was perhaps the most contentious of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and became the subject of a vicious multiyear imbroglio in Congress. Now the operation has been halted entirely — with barely a whimper. Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorised the government to collect a broad range of business records ...

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• 12 March

  Modi should keep the peace in South Asia

  Yet again, a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan appears to have been narrowly averted. As India looks ahead to its approaching election, the world’s biggest democracy should take care to draw the right lessons from the crisis. The great temptation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be to exploit and even inflame the country’s mood of militant ...

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• 12 March

  These friendly skies will soon be filled with hot air

  

  When a massive helium-filled airship designed by Flying Whales, a French manufacturer, takes to the air for the first time in 2021, it won’t be against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Instead, it’ll probably fly over Jingmen, a dusty farm and industrial town in central China where Flying Whales and state-owned China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co., Ltd. (CAIGA) ...

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• 12 March

  Huawei shows real US-China imbalance

  

  On March 7, Huawei Technologies Co. held a press conference to announce it’s suing the US government, arguing that a law passed last year barring the Chinese company’s equipment from certain networks is unconstitutional. A week earlier, its CFO Meng Wanzhou sued Canadian authorities alleging wrongful detention. Meanwhile, the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment maker has sought to recruit foreign journalists for ...

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• 12 March

  Norway’s oil disposal drama descends into farce

  

  I’ll confess, despite the best efforts of Netflix, my exposure to Norwegian comedy is very limited. That said, the finale to the one show I’ve vaguely followed – “What to Do With All Our Oil Stocks?” – has a pleasing subtlety to it; a knowing wink; the faintest tug of a leg-pull. Roughly 16 months ago, Norway’s central bank advised ...

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• 12 March

  Danske watchdog may bypass courts as laundering fines soar

  

  Bloomberg Denmark plans to let its financial watchdog impose fines without going via the courts, in order to speed up the process of punishing banks involved in money laundering. The decision, which still needs to be debated in the country’s parliament, is the latest step being pushed by Business Minister Rasmus Jarlov as he responds to a $230 billion dirty ...

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• 12 March

  Swedish government wants bank tax that ‘really hits’ right targets

  Bloomberg Sweden’s government wants to revisit the idea of imposing a tax on the financial industry. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson says her goal is to have a levy that singles out banks with far more precision than previous proposals. “It should include only the financial sector,” she said in an interview in Stockholm. “We want one that has a more ...

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• 12 March

  Goldman’s Apple card offers big win for Georgia firm

  

  Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has picked a little-known technology firm to help handle payments for its planned credit-card partnership with Apple Inc. The bank struck a deal last year to license payments-processing software from CoreCard Software, owned by Intelligent Systems Corp., to help with its foray into the consumer-card business, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, ...

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