March, 2019

• 2 March

  Facing jail in Caracas, Guaido travels across South America

  

  Bloomberg Juan Guaido’s first stop after he skipped out of Venezuela last week was Colombia. But after he failed to push food and medicine across the borders to hasten the end of autocratic President Nicolas Maduro’s rule, he headed to Brazil. Now, he’s in Argentina following meetings in Paraguay, and is expected to head to Ecuador on Saturday to be ...

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• 2 March

  Australian ministers quit as election looms

  

  Bloomberg Pressure built on Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison after a second lawmaker quit in as many days, just weeks ahead of an upcoming national election. Defense Minister Christopher Pyne said on Saturday that he will retire at the election. Steven Ciobo, in charge of the defense industry portfolio, also said that he won’t re-contest his seat. Ciobo’s resignation makes ...

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• 2 March

  Trump’s base clings tight despite rising tide of troubles

  

  Bloomberg Donald Trump had a rough week. His former lawyer told a House committee that the president is a cheat and a racist who has committed fraud, hours before Trump returned empty-handed from a high-stakes summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Hanoi. Yet just down the Potomac River from Washington, at an annual gathering of influential conservatives, none of ...

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• 2 March

  Orban’s political alliance nears end of road

  

  Bloomberg Europe’s main political family moved closer to a showdown with its most troublesome member, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, over his increasingly euroskeptic behavior. The European Union’s Christian Democrats sent two sets of warnings to Orban and his Fidesz party, signaling a greater determination to confront populist forces in the run-up to EU legislative elections in May. Manfred Weber, ...

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• 2 March

  Yellow Vests protests not comprehensible: Macron

  Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron said that grassroots Yellow Vests protests are no longer comprehensible and that “the country needs a return to calm.” “I hope that the weeks to come will show a decline” in the Yellow Vests movement, Macron said in Bordeaux. He spoke during a session that was part of a series of national public debates he ...

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• 2 March

  Promise of cheapest wind power hits snag in India

  

  Bloomberg India has drawn global attention since it started awarding wind power projects at record-low tariffs, spurring optimism that renewable energy could supplant the nation’s abundant coal resources in electricity generation. But about half of the more than one gigawatt of capacity awarded in the country’s first auctions in 2017 are incomplete, almost five months after their commissioning deadline, according ...

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• 2 March

  India’s economy slows as new risks emerge from Pakistan

  

  Bloomberg India’s economy slowed considerably last quarter, with little signs of a quick recovery amid rising political tensions with neighboring Pakistan and weaker global demand. Gross domestic product (GDP) rose 6.6 percent in the three months to December from a year ago, lower than the 6.7 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg survey and down from a revised 7 percent in ...

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• 2 March

  China defaults put focus on key gauge of industrial strains

  

  Bloomberg China’s mounting pile of distressed debt has elevated market players’ attention to one of the nation’s less obvious economic data points: the producer-price index (PPI). With many of the debtors that ran into trouble in the past year coming from the industrial world, gauges of manufacturing strain are particularly important. Some analysts point to the PPI as a forward ...

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• 2 March

  Japan’s lower house OKs record $907bn budget

  

  Bloomberg The lower chamber of the Japanese parliament early on Saturday approved the government’s record $907 billion initial budget bill for the fiscal year starting April 1. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner Komeito held a vote on the bill, clearing the way for its passage by the chamber to ensure it can be enacted ...

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• 2 March

  Indonesia inflation rate drops to lowest in almost a decade

  

  Bloomberg Inflation in Indonesia eased to a near-decade low, boosting odds that the next interest rate move by policy makers in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy could be down. Consumer prices rose 2.57 percent in February compared to a year earlier, the lowest since November 2009, according to figures released by the statistics office in Jakarta. That was lower than the ...

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