January, 2019

• 15 January

  Rising cost of socially responsible investing

  

  Both companies and the fund managers that invest in them are under pressure to pay more attention to environmental, social and governance issues. For the former group, that requires delivering increased transparency on an ever-expanding range of metrics. For the investment crowd, tailoring strategies to address the new demands means increased spending on data — at a time when fees ...

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• 15 January

  Apple needs to imagine its post-iPhone future

  

  Apple’s reported plans to cut iPhone production by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2019 make increasingly clear that the company’s base of loyal users isn’t an inexhaustible resource from whom it can forever extract a rent through its services offerings. Apple needs to compete more vigorously in all the other markets in which it’s present, without relying on ...

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• 15 January

  Trading business improved from 2018’s rough end: Citi

  

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc offered some hope that the worst is over for its bond-trading business after the toughest quarter for that unit in seven years. The lender’s shares jumped almost 4 percent, the most in the S&P 500 Index, after Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said the trading environment was starting to improve this month. The brighter outlook came after ...

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• 15 January

  Banks win break on trading-desk capital

  Bloomberg Big investment banks scored a victory in their campaign to soften global rules, as regulators reduced the capital hit from new trading-book standards by nearly half. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said its final market-risk standards will drive up banks’ trading-book capital requirements by a weighted average of about 22 percent from current levels. That’s down from the ...

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• 15 January

  ‘Fed may not raise rates as much as projected’

  Bloomberg Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida left open the possibility the US central bank will raise interest rates in 2019 fewer than the two times projected by policy makers at their last meeting. “A lot has really happened since the first week of December,” Clarida said in an interview on Fox Business Network. “Some of the global growth data ...

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• 15 January

  EIB sued over $69mn biomass loan

  

  Bloomberg The European Investment Bank (EIB) is being sued in the region’s second-highest court over a Spanish loan that climate lawyers contend will damage the environment. The suit is being brought by the not-for-profit environmental advocacy group ClientEarth, which wants European Union judges to determine whether the EIB breached its own renewable energy-financing criteria. The London-based group said it’s the ...

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• 15 January

  India’s subdued inflation signals RBI policy U-turn

  Bloomberg India’s headline inflation edging towards the lower-end of the central bank’s target band has opened the door to interest-rate cuts in coming months. While rate swaps show investors are pricing no change in the benchmark repurchase rate for the next 12 months, the Reserve Bank of India may be forced to jettison its hawkish stance adopted five months ago ...

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• 15 January

  Caution is the watchword for world’s top central banks

  

  Bloomberg Central banks enter the new year under pressure from investors to rethink just how aggressive they can be hiking interest rates. A slowdown in the world economy, the trade war and skittish financial markets are forcing policy makers including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to express fresh caution about their scope for tightening monetary policy. The People’s Bank of ...

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• 14 January

  UAE economy to grow by 3.8% in next 5 years

  

  DUBAI / WAM The UAE is forecast to achieve an average real GDP growth rate of 3.8% between 2019 and 2023, supported by an increase in investment flows and private consumption, according to new analysis from Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The findings of the analysis, based on the Dubai Chamber UAE Macroeconomic Model, were revealed during a business ...

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• 14 January

  FNC discusses draft law on space sector regulation

  DUBAI / WAM During its meeting at the headquarters of the Federal National Council (FNC), General Secretariat in Dubai, the FNC Technical, Energy, and Mineral Resources Affairs Committee, chaired by Mohammed Ali Al Kamali, Chairman of the Committee, continued discussing a draft law on regulating the space sector, which includes 55 articles. Al Kamali said the committee discussed the law ...

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