January, 2019

• 21 January

  London home asking prices dip to lowest since 2015

  

  Bloomberg London home asking prices fell to their weakest level in 3 1/2-years in January as sellers spooked by Brexit held off putting their properties up for sale. Asking prices in the capital slipped 1.5 percent from December to 593,972 pounds ($765,000), the lowest level since August 2015, according to Rightmove. New listings in the first two weeks of the ...

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• 21 January

  Will the global credit boom really go bust?

  

  We are in the midst of a worldwide credit boom that may be without precedent. The debt explosion suggests that the global economy — all the national economies combined — is being driven heavily by massive government and private borrowing. Is this debt buildup stable? Or is it the harbinger of a sharp economic slowdown or crash? No one really ...

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• 21 January

  Macron puts fishing before banking

  

  The reaction from Paris to Theresa May’s crushing defeat on her Brexit vote has been telling. Where people in the UK have assumed until now that President Emmanuel Macron was more concerned about grabbing finance jobs from the City of London, his focus appears to have shifted since the emergence of the gilets jaunes protesters. This week, France’s preparations for ...

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• 21 January

  Retailers are struggling to understand technology

  Tens of thousands of retail and tech professionals descended on New York for the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, an annual industry confab where exhibitors show off new innovations and the crowd collectively scoffs at the idea of any kind of looming retail apocalypse. The great sport of the event is wandering the rows of booths and trying to separate ...

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• 21 January

  Bank Indonesia should get a star for good behaviour

  Bank Indonesia (BI) put in the hard work. Time for at least some reward. The work was a concerted, consistent and not-at-all hysterical approach to the slide in emerging markets in 2018. That meant six interest-rate increases to stem the rupiah’s losses. The message was transparent: Because the Federal Reserve was hiking every quarter, Indonesia needed to prevent a rout ...

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• 21 January

  Britain better get used to being a small country

  

  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a small country that is about to get even smaller. I know that this simple statement of fact will nevertheless infuriate many English people — and I do mean English people, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Last week, at India’s Raisina Dialogue, the Spanish foreign minister said that there ...

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• 21 January

  A truly terrible idea for Deutsche Bank

  

  If you’re looking for one of the worst ideas in contemporary banking, look no further than Germany. The mooted merger between Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG would make a mockery of any notion that EU governments are serious about ending the “too big to fail” problem. It would also turn back the clock on a guiding principle of European ...

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• 21 January

  Economists need to add history to their tool kit

  

  Back in 2011, as the US and other countries debated what to do about a recession that was stretching on much longer than expected, economists Brad DeLong and Larry Summers bemoaned what they considered a major gap in their fellow economists’ toolkit. Economists, they noted, learn a lot of mathematical models and empirical facts about the present, but not much ...

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• 21 January

  ECB has narrow window for rate hikes: Economists

  

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will only have a narrow window to raise interest rates before the euro-area economy becomes too weak, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Mario Draghi is seen lifting the deposit rate at his final meeting as president in October, but his successor will only have until spring of 2020 to tighten policy before ...

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• 21 January

  Real interest rates in South Asia among highest in the world

  

  Bloomberg Real interest rates in South Asia are among the highest in the world, raising prospect of more dovish monetary policy in region. Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India rank in the top five of world’s major economies with the highest inflation-adjusted interest rates. While negative real rates might be considered a sign of financial instability, a high inflation-adjusted benchmark interest ...

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