November, 2018

• 28 November

  Microsoft beats Apple to become world’s most valuable firm

  

  Bloomberg Microsoft Corp surpassed Apple Inc to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. All it took was a $300 billion rout. After briefly claiming the top spot, Microsoft shares rose 0.6 percent, pushing the company’s market value to $828.1 billion at the close. That exceeded by more than $1 billion the value of Apple, which has tumbled this ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Trump threatens to cut GM’s subsidies

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s threat to cut subsidies to General Motors Co in retaliation for the automaker’s plan to close US factories was met with immediate skepticism. While it’s true that GM, like other US automakers, has received substantial federal assistance over the years — including a nearly $50 billion bailout in 2009 — experts cast doubt on the idea ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  UK house prices increase despite Brexit concerns

  

  Bloomberg London’s decade-long housing boom may have been cooled by Brexit, but the property market in the rest of the UK is largely shrugging it off. While home prices in the capital have risen only 1.7 percent since the June 2016 vote, those in Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, have jumped almost 15 percent, according to Hometrack. Manchester is close behind ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  BMW still preaches free trade as tariff threat looms

  

  Bloomberg BMW AG will keep spreading the gospel of free trade and back its rhetoric up by investing more in its massive US plant, all as the Trump administration mulls higher tariffs on imported autos. The German automaker is presenting two SUVs at the Los Angeles auto show this week: a refreshed X5 crossover and a new three-row model, the ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  IBM CEO blasts data use by Silicon Valley

  Bloomberg International Business Machines Corp Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined a growing chorus of tech executives lambasting web platforms, like Google and Facebook Inc, over their collection of user data and urged governments to target regulation at those companies. Without naming company names, Rometty pointed to the “irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platform companies” ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Was Great Recession worse than the Great Depression?

  

  Here’s today’s economic quiz: Was the 2007-09 Great Recession more damaging than the Great Depression of the 1930s? Surely the answer is “no.” In the 1930s, unemployment reached 25 percent. By contrast, the recent peak in the jobless rate was 10 percent. Case closed. Not so fast, objects economist J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley. “Fifty years ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Trump-Xi will make us forget G-20

  

  This weekend’s G-20 summit in Argentina will likely demonstrate what does and doesn’t work for this multilateral format, but also for international policy gatherings more generally. Despite weakening and diverging global economic growth, the aspiration for the larger discussions among leaders representing about three-quarters of global gross domestic product has been reduced to issuing bland joint commun- -iques — and ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Deliveroo’s banker boss takes a $4bn Uber ride

  

  Will Shu, Deliveroo’s chief executive, is a former investment banker. So he probably knows how to cook up deal interest in a food delivery company whose riders have become a feature of British city streets. Indeed, back in September, scoops from Bloomberg News and the Daily Telegraph indicated that both Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. had held early acquisition ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Emerging markets will step out of Fed’s shadow

  Gloom is dissipating for emerging markets, and they can thank American influence. There’s a lesson there, and a payoff. With the Federal Reserve approaching a pause in its interest-rate increases, pressure on nations like Indonesia will lighten significantly. No longer will they have to hike interest rates to buttress local currencies; they may conceivably get scope to cut. That’s a ...

  Read More »
• 28 November

  Brexit’s Plan B has a fatal flaw

  

  When European Union (EU) leaders met in Brussels on Sunday to finalise the Brexit divorce agreement, they made one thing clear: There is no Plan B. But some Conservative lawmakers, skeptical the deal will get through parliament, are working hard on, yes, Plan B. Their basic idea – the Norway option – isn’t new. Sometimes that rumpled piece of paper ...

  Read More »