October, 2018

• 14 October

  Canada imposes duties on steel imports in response to US levy

  

  Bloomberg Canada is applying quotas and a 25 percent tariff on steel imports from China and other countries to avoid becoming a dumping ground for steel in the face of metal levies imposed by US President Donald Trump. Canada will erect new barriers to any flood of shipments of seven types of foreign steel, and will issue refunds and exemptions ...

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• 14 October

  GE investors get reality check as critics warn of rough road ahead

  

  Bloomberg A pair of General Electric Co.’s most prominent critics is reminding investors that solving all of the company’s problems won’t be as simple as appointing a new CEO. The downtrodden manufacturer is weighed down by a deteriorating finance business and doesn’t have enough assets or cash-flow to pay down its liabilities, according to Steve Tusa, a JPMorgan Chase & ...

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• 14 October

  Fox bondholders push back on Disney offer

  

  Bloomberg Walt Disney Co is looking at ways to accommodate a group of 21st Century Fox Inc bondholders that say they are being wronged by a bond exchange deal as the two companies prepare to combine, according to a person familiar with the matter. Disney has offered to pay holders of $18.1 billion of Fox debt a small fee in ...

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• 14 October

  Lime crashes in court bid to disrupt scooter scene

  

  Bloomberg Lime, the electric scooter company valued at a $1 billion, lost its bid for a court order temporarily halting San Francisco’s plan to let two smaller companies operate after the city denied Lime a permit. But to Lime, a court decision not to block the city from launching its pilot program wasn’t all bad. The judge wants to “get ...

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• 14 October

  Italy emerges as creeping concern among finance chiefs in Bali

  

  Bloomberg As if trade wars, rising interest rates and slowing global growth weren’t enough, the world’s finance chiefs are zeroing in on another source of concern: Italy. The populist government’s rule-busting budget plans and accusatory rhetoric against its European partners have repeatedly cropped up among ministers and central bankers at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the ...

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• 14 October

  On global warming its mission impossible

  

  If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations group charged with monitoring global warming. Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), ...

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• 14 October

  Fear not, ETFs control the gold price

  

  Gold isn’t like anything else on the market. Ancient, fundamental, eternal – it’s different from all those here-today, gone-tomorrow assets such as Snap Inc. shares and cryptocurrencies. Right? Wrong. The last week’s surge in the spot gold price – a 2.5 percent jump to $1,224 an ounce, its sharpest leap in more than two years – looks like confirmation of ...

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• 14 October

  Trump’s EPA would tie its own hands on rules

  

  Mercury is a noxious byproduct of burning coal. It contaminates fish and, in turn, people, leading to brain damage in infants and small children, as well as serious cardiovascular and central nervous system problems in adults. Restrictions on US power plants have substantially reduced their emissions of mercury since 2015. Apparently, the Trump administration has a problem with that. Specifically, ...

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• 14 October

  China can’t grow like an emerging market forever

  There’s no economic crisis in China. There is a slowdown. That can be a good thing. Yes, China is the second-largest economy and deeply enmeshed in the planet’s commercial map. That’s all the more reason it needs to keep becoming a more normal economy, with a more mature pace of growth. That will increasingly be driven by consumers and technology, ...

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• 14 October

  Trump puts supply-side economics to its final test

  

  Corporate tax cuts were basically the last hope for supply-side economics. This economic doctrine, which became popular in the 1980s, holds that taxes distort the economy a great deal, and that cutting taxes therefore produces big gains in growth. Those gains are assumed to eventually result in higher wages for workers, leading some to derisively label the idea as trickle-down ...

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