November, 2018

• 3 November

  Trump’s tariff war scrambles US trade routes as soy piles up

  

  Bloomberg US President Donald Trump’s trade war isn’t only rattling global soybean markets. It’s also shifting the flow of crops within the US, changing pricing patterns and boosting how much of this season’s bumper crop needs to be stored. Traders shipping soybeans through the Pacific Northwest, a key export hub to China, are now diverting supply from that route south ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  US trade gap reaches seven-month high

  

  Bloomberg The US trade deficit widened more than forecast in September to a seven-month high as imports expanded and the merchandise gap with China hit a record amid an escalating tariff war. The gap for goods and services increased 1.3 percent from the prior month to $54 billion, Commerce Department data showed. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Sluggish wages, exports hit Canadian growth

  

  Bloomberg Canada’s unemployment rate fell back to four-decade lows, but sluggish wage increases and slumping exports offer little evidence the economy is running hot enough to warrant accelerated interest rate increases. Statistics Canada released jobs data that showed modest employment gains, but with a shrinking labour force and the slowest wage gains in a year. A separate trade report continued ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Facebook gets symbolic fine in Cambridge Analytica row

  

  Bloomberg Facebook Inc. was slapped with a symbolic 500,000-pound ($645,000) fine by the UK’s privacy regulator for “serious” violations of data protection rules that paved the way for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is the highest possible for the Information Commissioner’s Office under old rules that predated this year’s European Union revamp of privacy penalties. The ICO said that ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Nokia bets on job cuts, fourth-quarter boost to meet targets

  

  Bloomberg Nokia Oyj said it will reap the rewards of higher spending on next-generation wireless networks in the final months of 2018, after the Finnish company announced an unspecified number of jobs reductions in a $1 billion drive to cut costs to reach long-term targets. The results showed that the company has some way to go to fulfill Chief Executive ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Don’t expect robots to take away everyone’s job

  

  How many jobs are vulnerable to automation? Plenty of people ask that question, and plenty of people try to give numerical answers. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that about 46 percent of jobs have a better-than-even chance of being automated. A 2016 study by Citigroup Inc. and the University of Oxford reported that ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  What is scarier than climate change?

  

  What’s so scary about climate change? The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films. How about “rat explosion”? As the climate ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Exxon did great, but something’s missing

  Exxon Mobil Corp. needed a good quarter, and it got a good quarter. It beat the consensus earnings estimate in the third quarter, having missed in the previous three. Sure, the margin of victory owed a bit to disposals and favorable tax treatment, but there were big underlying gains in both the upstream and downstream businesses. In particular, Exxon notched ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Indians abroad can ease liquidity crunch at home

  Those who are awash in cash lack capital. Those who have adequate capital are thirsty for liquidity. That, in a nutshell, is the story of India’s financial crunch, and the surest way to ease it will require tapping Indians living overseas. In the past, New Delhi has resorted to such special hard-currency deposit programs to tide over balance-of-payment difficulties. A ...

  Read More »
• 3 November

  Can central banks survive onslaught of populists?

  

  Is central bank independence the next casualty of the age of populism? In the US, President Donald Trump has declared that the Federal Reserve is “going loco.” He blames Fed Chairman Jerome Powell for threatening “his” recovery and for market volatility caused in part by uncertainty over the trade war Trump himself started. In India, reports emerged this week that ...

  Read More »