January, 2019

• 8 January

  Orban risks first union strike since 1989

  

  Bloomberg Bolstered by a wave of nationwide protests, Hungary’s labour unions are mulling whether to hold their first general strike since the 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain. Industrial workers were among the more than 10,000 people braved freezing weather in Budapest over the weekend to demand Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government repeal a new law allowing companies to ask ...

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• 8 January

  Modi’s ouster of CBI chief rejected by court

  

  Bloomberg India’s Supreme Court overturned the federal government’s decision to oust the chief of the country’s top investigative agency in a blow to PM Narendra Modi just months before he seeks re-election. The government in October removed Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) director Alok Verma and special director Rakesh Asthana after their rift — involving corruption allegations against each other ...

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• 8 January

  How US, Russia and China are managing cyberwar

  

  In cyberspace, conflict is the norm when it comes to nation-states. Russia’s malware shows up on US power grids, and its online trolls try to influence elections. China, meanwhile, steals the personal data and intellectual property of leading American corporations. The US, for its part, has its hackers on a war footing. So it may seem the prospects for dialogue ...

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• 8 January

  Stocks matter, even for bond traders

  

  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally decided that the stock market’s tantrum over the past month was too noisy to ignore. Traders bemoaned the fact that Powell considered the central bank’s balance-sheet runoff to be on “automatic pilot.” So he softened his tone on January 4 during a panel at an American Economic Association meeting in Atlanta, saying policy makers ...

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• 8 January

  flyby is a victory for unmanned missions

  Some likened it to a snowman. Others to a peanut. Still others to an embryonic dinosaur. Ultima Thule, a mottled and malformed space rock at the farthest edge of the solar system, got its first close-up photos this week thanks to Nasa’s New Horizons mission. They offered a glimpse of the most distant object ever visited by man-made machinery — ...

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• 8 January

  US trade negotiators can help China get to yes

  The damage caused by President Trump’s trade fight with China has spread farther and faster than many expected. Factories in China and the US have seen orders slump. American farmers are hurting. A collapse in Chinese demand for iPhones knocked nearly $75 billion off Apple Inc.’s market cap in a single day. Slower growth just prompted China’s central bank to ...

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• 8 January

  There’s good reason to give up on World Bank

  

  For the head of the World Bank Group to quit unexpectedly would have been big news under any circumstances. But, the reason outgoing president Jim Yong Kim gave for his resignation on Monday is even more revealing. Kim said he was leaving the world’s most influential development and infrastructure-building agency to join a private-sector infrastructure investment fund because he believed ...

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• 8 January

  China’s old debt playbook problem

  

  Build it and they will come. Or will they? A flurry of construction may be about to take off in China, and investors have pinned their hopes on it. Stocks of Japanese machinery makers Komatsu Ltd. and Hitachi Construction Machinery Co. perked up on Monday. Over the past week, Chinese engineering and construction companies’ shares have surfaced from multi-month lows. ...

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• 8 January

  Health-care costs are still eating the US economy

  

  Health-care costs are not as much in the news nowadays as they used to be. A big reason might be that cost growth has slowed in recent years. Between 1967 and 2007, per-capita health care costs rose at an average of 2.36 percent a year. Since then, it’s only been about 1.31 percent. That’s actually not such great news. Health-care ...

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• 8 January

  US stocks surge after Donald Trump sees China progress

  

  Bloomberg Stocks surged on Tuesday after the Trump administration said there was progress coming out of its two-day mid-level trade talks with China. The dollar rose with Treasury yields, and crude climbed towards $50 a barrel on expectations the market will be tightened by OPEC’s output cuts. All major US equity benchmarks were higher. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq gauges ...

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