February, 2019

• 2 February

  6.1-magnitude quake hits western Indonesia

  Bloomberg An earthquake with magnitude 6.1 on the Richter scale hit western Indonesia on Saturday, though Xinhua reported that officials see no risk of a tsunami. The epicenter was 166 kilometers south-south-east of Muara Siberut in Indonesia, the United States Geological Survey said. The quake had a depth of 10 kilometers. The main shock struck at 4.27 pm local time ...

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• 2 February

  Modi flicks populist switch as tight India election nears

  

  Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unleashed a populist election-year budget designed to shore up support ahead of national polls, but it may have come too late to dampen criticism of his government’s inability to create millions of jobs. The budget contained $13 billion worth of measures including payouts for farmers, a pension program for informal sector workers and tax ...

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• 2 February

  Trump to call on Democrats to ‘heal’

  

  Bloomberg Donald Trump lashed out at US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling her “bad for our country,” undercutting the White House’s message that the president plans to make an optimistic plea for bipartisanship in his State of the Union address next week. “I think she’s very bad for our country,” Trump said in an interview with CBS, referring to the ...

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• 2 February

  Venezuelans march on capital to seek fresh vote

  Bloomberg Opponents of Venezuela’s socialist regime marched in Caracas as pressure builds at home and abroad for President Nicolas Maduro to step down. Opposition leader Juan Guaido, who’s vying to set up a caretaker government, rallied his supporters to the streets as a deadline imposed by several European Union countries to hold a presidential election expires. The US and two ...

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• 2 February

  Alberta eases oil production limit as price for heavy crude surges

  

  Bloomberg Alberta is easing mandatory oil curtailments after prices for heavy crude from the Canadian province surged while producers were getting exasperated. The new target for output next month will be 3.63 million barrels a day, up from 3.56 million in January, the provincial government said in a statement. Inventories have dropped by 5 million barrels, reducing a glut that ...

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• 2 February

  Russia oil output cuts fall below Novak’s estimates

  

  Bloomberg Russia’s crude producers removed their first 42,000 barrels per day from the market in January under the OPEC+ output-cut agreement, slightly below earlier estimates of Energy Minister Alexander Novak. Russia produced 48.11 million tons of crude oil, according to data from the Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK unit. This equals 11.376 million barrels per day compared to the October baseline of ...

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• 2 February

  Fed doves delight as Kaplan, Bullard laud policy patience

  

  Bloomberg Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard and Dallas Fed chief Robert Kaplan applauded the central bank’s decision to take a pause on interest-rate increases in separate appearances and said patience was the right approach for the US economy. “I think it set us up for a very good couple of years here,” Bullard said in a ...

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• 2 February

  DWS says clients withdrew $8bn in fourth quarter

  

  Bloomberg DWS Group, the German asset manager taken public by Deutsche Bank AG in March, is wrestling with withdrawals, though its executives say the worst is behind them. Investors pulled 7 billion euros ($8 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2018, taking total redemptions last year to more than 22 billion euros. To make matters worse, the volatility that roiled ...

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• 2 February

  Deutsche Bank sees Commerzbank merger by mid-year

  

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG’s top ranks are bracing for a potential government-brokered merger with rival Commerzbank AG by mid-year as they run out of time to turn Germany’s largest bank around. Executives are concerned such a deal may become their only option if there’s no clear improvement in the first three months of 2019, people briefed on their thinking say. ...

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• 2 February

  Barclays to shift $217bn assets to Dublin

  

  Bloomberg Barclays Plc won permission to transfer large parts of its business from Britain to its Dublin-based subsidiary if needed, with a judge disclosing that the Brexit-driven move could affect thousands of the bank’s corporate clients. The London-based bank had requested court approval for the potential move, which was granted by High Court Judge Richard Snowden. Snowden described the move ...

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