December, 2018

• 19 December

  Sweden hopes ‘break’ to solve its govt crisis

  Bloomberg After three months of gridlock, Sweden still doesn’t have a government. Now, party leaders will get a three-week respite in the hope that they can come back with a solution. Parliament speaker Andreas Norlen said that he will meet again with party leaders on January 14 and called for a prime minister vote two days later. If that fails, ...

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• 19 December

  France’s Yellow Vests might enter politics

  

  Bloomberg France’s Yellow Vests may have peaked as a protest movement, but they are contemplating a next step: presenting candidates in next May’s European elections to provide another outlet for voters angry at President Emmanuel Macron. The limited amount of polling so far suggests a Yellow Vests campaign wouldn’t impact Macron’s party in selecting legislators for the European Parliament. Instead, ...

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• 19 December

  South Africa issues arrest warrant for Grace Mugabe

  

  Bloomberg South African authorities issued a warrant of arrest for Grace Mugabe, the wife of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, civil rights organisation AfriForum said. A charge of assault was laid against Grace Mugabe in South Africa last year, after local media including the Star newspaper reported that she assaulted a woman at a hotel in Johannesburg. While she agreed ...

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• 19 December

  The EU plays Trump as it played the Brexiters

  

  The Trump administration has pulled out all the stops to attack the European Union (EU). Realising its relative weakness, the EU hasn’t tried a muscular response. Instead, it has used the same tactic as it did with Britain’s Brexiters. On December 11, the US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, accused Europe of disregarding all the goodwill built up since ...

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• 19 December

  May’s immigration ‘obsession’

  

  Cracking down on immigration is how Theresa May has chosen to interpret the Brexit campaign’s promise to “take back control.” As a result, the UK prime minister has ruled out one of the more plausible alternatives to her own EU withdrawal deal: The so-called “Norway-Plus” idea, which would keep Britain in the European single market and force it to accept ...

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• 19 December

  Donald Trump is wrong to weaken clean water rules

  President Trump really dislikes the 2015 Clean Water Rule. Barely a month after taking office he directed the Environmental Protection Agency to take steps towards killing it. The “horrible, horrible” rule, he said, was a “massive power grab” that burdens farmers and developers with restrictions on “every puddle” and “every ditch.” In fact, the rule simply clarifies the scope of ...

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• 19 December

  Why Treasuries can’t be a weapon in a trade war

  As far as ideas go, the notion that Beijing has bargaining power over Washington by virtue of being America’s largest creditor is an old chestnut. However, the current US-China trade conflict has revived interest in the drop in Chinese holdings of US Treasuries to their lowest level in a year and a half. The fifth straight decline took the stock ...

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• 19 December

  After 40 years, China must remember its old friends

  

  Nobody can know if, when Deng Xiaoping launched his strategy of “Reform and Opening Up” 40 years ago, even he could have predicted the near-miraculous transformation of the Chinese economy that would follow. In the years since then, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty and into the ranks of the global middle class; China’s industrial heartland ...

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• 19 December

  Modi’s losses, RBI chief raise populism risk

  

  Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, took two big blows in less than 24 hours. Investors should worry less about the bruises, and more about what he might do to recover from them before next year’s general elections. The first knock came when besieged Reserve Bank of India (RBI)  governor Urjit Patel abruptly resigned. Although he cited personal reasons, nobody ...

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• 19 December

  14,889,930,106,680 reasons to fear recession

  

  Traders and investors will be glad to see the back of 2018. It’s been the worst rout since 1901, by Deutsche Bank AG’s reckoning, with almost every asset class delivering losses. The figures illustrate the backdrop to what went wrong this year – and hint at what could go better in 2019. $14,889,930,106,680 That’s how much the total value of ...

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