Bloomberg More than three months after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo picked Stephen Biegun to lead negotiations with North Korea, the former Ford Motor Co. executive has barely met officials from Pyongyang face-to-face. The standstill is a sign of how negotiations between the US and North Korea have faltered, forcing a lowering of expectations, since President Donald Trump met with ...
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December, 2018
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8 December
Trump deserves credit for a truce with China
Just because the US and China have agreed to call a truce in their trade war doesn’t mean that it’s over: This was a classic exercise in can-kicking. Nonetheless, most cans have quite a few kicks in them, and overall this is good news for the global economy. Instead of sweeping everything under the rug, as was the case before ...
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8 December
Admit it, Britain loves German grocers
At an Aldi grocery store overlooking the rugged Kent coast in southeast England, customers are loading up their shopping carts. It’s the same situation at a Lidl outpost in scenic Oban, Scotland. The British love affair with the German no-frills supermarkets started about a decade ago, and shows no signs of abating. And that will be crucial in determining whether ...
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8 December
If Europe can tax Google, so can everybody else
France and Germany have now reached a consensus on how to tax some of the Silicon Valley giants. America, the ball’s in your court. The two countries released a statement declaring their support for a 3 percent tax on digital ads, providing a breakthrough in European Union wrangling on how to deal with big tech. It’s essentially a levy on ...
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8 December
Macron’s fuel tax retreat shouldn’t mean surrender
Faced with increasingly violent protests, French President Emmanuel Macron has suspended his plan to raise fuel taxes. The climbdown is a concession to political necessity, but it shouldn’t be confused with smart policy, and it shouldn’t deflect Macron from his larger goals. Even in a country with a fabled tradition of riotous dissent, the intensity of the protests in France ...
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8 December
Stress over Brexit issue isn’t just in your head
The uncertainty of the ongoing Brexit drama is taking an emotional toll on the British public. Since the original vote in 2016, there has been a 13.7 percent increase in prescriptions for antidepressants relative to other drugs. Political chaos has consequences for public health. Indeed, the results of a new study suggest that people subjected to long periods of intense ...
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8 December
Facebook’s exposure to risky revenue
What’s a troubled social network to do? Facing a crisis of confidence, Facebook appears to struggle to take actions on its own, whether out of uncertainty or stubbornness, and it’s not clear a divided Congress and the Trump administration could agree on regulatory actions to force its hand. One simple first step would be a bit more financial transparency. Inspired ...
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8 December
Doctors, economists have a prescription for Grab
GrabTaxi Holdings Pte has a lot of smart people on its payroll. Let’s hope the transportation startup spends more time listening to its economists. Yeah I know, startup and economics in the same sentence. Go-Jek Indonesia PT’s entry into Singapore was inevitable the moment Grab bought out the local business of Uber Technologies Inc. It already had its sights on ...
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8 December
Retailers try payment apps to sidestep $90bn in third-party swipe fees
Bloomberg Retailers have been trying for years to escape the clutches of the credit-card companies, which this year will levy more than $90 billion in swipe fees on an industry already struggling to navigate the shift online. Some believe the answer lies in payment apps. While shoppers have largely shunned mobile payments offered by third-party providers like Apple Inc., retailers ...
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8 December
Scooter-rental startup Skip gets $100 million in debt
Bloomberg Skip Transport, one of two companies that won licenses to rent scooters on the streets of San Francisco, received $100 million in debt and is seeking more funding from investors, said three people familiar with the matter. While it explores an equity deal, Skip plans to use the debt on a project to design and build scooters that would ...
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