November, 2018

• 14 November

  PG&E investors may not get California’s help soon

  Bloomberg As prices of stocks and bonds issued by PG&E Corp touch record lows, investors probably won’t get any certainty soon from the incoming California governor on how he would deal with the utility’s liabilities from the fatal fires ravaging the state. In a brief news conference with Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who will succeed him in ...

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• 14 November

  Johnson Controls seals $13.2bn battery unit deal

  

  Bloomberg Johnson Controls International Plc’s $13.2 billion sale of its car-battery business completes the company’s dramatic makeover from an automotive supplier to a provider of systems for homes and buildings, setting the stage for growth through acquisitions. Chief Executive Officer George Oliver is betting on continued growth of “smart buildings” as companies seek to boost efficiency of working spaces with ...

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• 14 November

  UK inflation stays at 2.4% in October

  Bloomberg An anticipated pickup in UK inflation failed to materialise last month as food, clothing and transport prices declined. Annual consumer-price growth stayed at 2.4 percent in October, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The figure is below the 2.5 percent predicted by both the Bank of England and economists in a Bloomberg survey. Food and non-alcoholic drink ...

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• 14 November

  Xi Jinping, not Trump, is the true cold warrior

  

  The US-China trade war is looking more and more like a cold war. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, crackdown on alleged Chinese theft of American technology, and rhetoric have overturned decades of US foreign policy that had prioritised cooperation. Meanwhile, his counterpart Xi Jinping hasn’t budged on any concessions. China experts worry that relations between the world’s two most important countries ...

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• 14 November

  Italy’s money problems are starting

  

  Italy has managed to scrape by with its 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) monthly auction of three, seven and 20-year government bonds on Tuesday. It has now completed nearly 95 percent of its annual funding target, but that’s where the good news ends. It is still visibly struggling to place longer-dated paper. Benchmark 10-year yields stayed high, even after the ...

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• 14 November

  Malaysia’s market calm rests on sticky foundations

  

  Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been lucky, so far. His country looks to have come out of this year’s emerging-markets rout largely unscathed. The ringgit has fallen only 3.4 percent against the dollar, while the MSCI Malaysia Index has dipped a mere 5.9 percent, compared with a 16 percent slump for the broader emerging-markets gauge. Beneath the calm is ...

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• 14 November

  Three-minute chat that wiped billions off stocks

  A three minute conversation on stage at UBS AG’s Global Technology Conference in San Francisco helped wipe more than $190 billion from global stocks. Lumentum Holdings Inc. makes lasers for 3D facial recognition used by major smartphone makers, with Apple Inc. its key client. On Monday, the company announced a 17 percent cut in its December-quarter revenue outlook. That triggered ...

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• 14 November

  India’s shadow banks may need to suffer some pain

  

  In India, crises move slowly. We’ve known for years that the state-controlled banks that dominate the financial sector were groaning under the weight of bad loans. For years, though, the government successfully kicked the can down the road. All those assets haven’t been accounted for yet, the banks haven’t been fully recapitalised, the bankruptcy process isn’t working to schedule, yet ...

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• 14 November

  Banks will pay for China’s ‘obsession’

  

  Chinese regulators have stepped back from imposing hard-and-fast rules on how much banks must lend to the cash-starved private sector. Their exhortation isn’t going away, though, and that means investors in shares of lenders should prepare for more pain. Authorities will refrain from imposing specific targets for each bank and are urging firms to conduct appropriate due diligence, according to ...

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• 14 November

  One of Facebook’s biggest fans is angry now

  

  Never before has one company’s failure had such a devastating effect on the world, wrote the technology journalist David Kirkpatrick. He continued: Racists, autocrats, and purveyors of hate and disorder have found Facebook the perfect medium for spewing poison, normalising it, and gaining adherents. … Societies around the world are reeling from the consequences. Politics and democracy are under duress. ...

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