December, 2018

• 10 December

  Ex-ruling party wiped out as revolutionary wins Armenia vote

  

  Bloomberg Armenia’s former ruling Republican party was wiped out in parliamentary elections that handed a massive majority to the leader of the country’s “Velvet Revolution.” Preliminary results show acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s My Step alliance won 70.4 percent of votes in Sunday’s elections, Armenia’s Central Election Commission reported. The Republicans received 4.7 percent, just short of the 5 percent ...

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• 10 December

  Sweden’s Lofven faces defeat in PM vote

  

  Bloomberg Swedish Social Democratic leader Stefan Lofven is now facing a defeat in a potential prime minister vote after an attempt at forging a broader coalition failed. After a week of talks, the opposition Center Party rejected forming a government with the Social Democrats, throwing negotiations wide open again three months after the Nordic nation’s inconclusive election that saw big ...

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• 10 December

  Russia’s Butina tells judge she wants to change not guilty plea

  Bloomberg Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who befriended leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Republican Party and then was accused of acting as an undeclared agent of the Kremlin, has decided to change her plea of not guilty to at least one of the two charges she faces. In a court filing, Butina’s lawyers asked a ...

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• 10 December

  Macron pressed on all sides for grand gesture to end crisis

  

  Bloomberg Secluded in his Presidential palace, Emmanuel Macron is looking for a miracle. An angry France is waiting to see if he finds one. Macron was due to address the nation on Monday evening. Everyone, from Yellow Vest protesters to his dwindling number of supporters, is anticipating some solution to end the downward spiral of Europe’s second largest economy, started ...

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• 10 December

  Michael Flynn appears to have come full circle

  

  Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn appears to have come full circle, if you read carefully the sentencing memo by special counsel Robert Mueller recommending that Flynn serve no jail time despite pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI. The Trump campaign warrior of 2016 who led chants of ‘lock her up’ deriding Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and then ...

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• 10 December

  High earners complicate Powell’s job

  

  If data dependency is the name of the game, then Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has his work cut out for him. In an economy driven by consumption, the key is having a firm grasp on how spending is poised to perform in future. The effects of monetary policy play out with a lag of around one year, which suggests ...

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• 10 December

  The robots are stealing some of your bonus

  The good news for asset managers is that they will get an average pay increase this year of 5%. The bad news is that increased spending on technology is reducing the amount of money available to their compensation pools. That’s the conclusion of the annual Asset Management Compensation study jointly published by financial services research firm Greenwich Associates and pay ...

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• 10 December

  Europe’s tech tax is a big mistake in the making

  One way or another, Europe is determined to get tech companies to pay their fair share. All that remains is to decide the meaning of “tech company,” “pay,” “fair” and “share.” After months of talks, France and Germany have proposed a plan to tax big digital companies 3 percent of their Europe-based advertising revenue. This is a scaled-back version of ...

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• 10 December

  Huawei bust reveals the real US-China trade war

  

  If you only scan the headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking that the US-China trade war is mainly about tariffs. After all, the president and trade-warrior-in-chief has called himself “Tariff Man.” And the tentative trade deal between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was mainly about tariffs, especially on items like automobiles. But the startling arrest ...

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• 10 December

  Climate change moves from risk to reward

  

  As the effects of climate change loom ever larger, financial markets are embracing sustainability. Long a marginal concern at best, it has become a central component of any successful investment strategy. It’s no wonder the financial industry is starting to incorporate global warming in its risk assessments and requirements for transparency: Recent natural disasters, like the fires in California or ...

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