January, 2019

• 21 January

  Facebook endows AI ethics institute at German varsity

  

  Bloomberg Facebook Inc is endowing a new institute devoted to the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) at the Technical University of Munich, in Germany. The new center, which Facebook is funding with an initial grant of $7.5 million over five years, will investigate issues around AI safety, fairness, privacy and transparency, Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning, ...

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• 21 January

  US shutdown pain yet to infect economic-growth forecasts

  

  Bloomberg For all the hand-wringing and headlines over the fallout of the US government shutdown, most forecasters still don’t expect it to cause too much pain to the economy so long as it doesn’t endure. Analysts project the government will reopen by mid-February, though if the closure lasts through March, the disruption will cause economic growth to dip below 2 ...

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• 21 January

  Just Eat CEO exits with threat from rivals rising

  

  Bloomberg Just Eat Plc’s CEO is leaving after a surge in competition from rival apps and pressure from an activist shareholder to speed up decision-making and consider the sale of assets. Peter Plumb is stepping down with immediate effect, with Peter Duffy, chief customer officer, appointed as interim CEO. In December, shareholder Cat Rock Capital Management LP recommended Just Eat’s ...

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• 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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