October, 2018

• 13 October

  Italy’s banks stumble into a new crisis

  

  Spare a thought for Italian banks if you can. Barely recovered from their recent crisis, the country’s lenders find they have stumbled into a new one. Rome’s populist administration has sent yields on government bonds soaring by passing a budget that busts the EU’s fiscal rules. And since Italian banks still hold hefty amounts of those bonds, investors have taken ...

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• 13 October

  JPMorgan Chase defies market’s nervousness

  Wall Street’s powerhouses are beginning to lose some power. JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off third-quarter earnings for the big banks on Friday, and while the results were better than expected, they showed a lack of energy in key division: investment banking. Revenue from fixed-income trading was down 10 percent, which was worse than analysts were expecting. Fees from equity ...

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• 13 October

  The falsehoods in Trump’s health-care argument

  President Donald Trump once pledged to replace Obamacare with a system that would provide good health insurance for all Americans. His failure to devise such a plan became obvious during his first year in office, as he and the Republican Congress tried in vain to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Various alternatives were floated that would have only increased the ...

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• 13 October

  Pakistan’s bailout exposes China’s Belt and Road flaws

  

  Pakistan’s government has finally admitted it needs help. Finance Minister Asad Umar says he will be meeting officials of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the sidelines of its annual meeting Bali this weekend. There he’ll try and work out the terms for a bailout that would cover a $10 billion hole in Pakistan’s financing needs. The decision has to ...

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• 13 October

  What slowdown? Japan Inc. roars ahead

  

  Japan Inc. is getting its groove back. An overlooked policy change could be a driver. In recent months, Japanese companies have been posting a wave of positive data. Machinery orders — a key indicator of companies’ capital spending in the future — rose 12.6 percent on the year in August to the highest level in a decade, data showed, much ...

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• 13 October

  $46 billion, and Britain hasn’t even moved out

  

  As Britain’s negotiations to leave the European Union (EU) enter their crunch moment, let’s be clear on one thing: The EU doesn’t need to punish Britain for leaving; the referendum did that just fine. Latest figures show the warnings of economic self-harm Brexiters like Boris Johnson derided as Project Fear are fast becoming real, while the promises of a Brexit ...

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• 13 October

  Trains — a step ahead in innovation

  

  Bloomberg The airline and automotive industries are abuzz with talk of driver-less travel and electric propulsion, so much so that they might seem to be the pacesetters in transport technology. Yet train manufacturers around the world are introducing innovations that may be years away for cars and planes. Rail chiefs met recently at the biennial Innotrans trade fair in Berlin ...

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• 13 October

  Google unveils new Pixel phone, speaker

  

  Bloomberg Google showed off a pair of new Pixel phones, a tablet computer, and a speaker with a screen in a deluge of new products aimed at competing with the latest gadgets from other big tech rivals. The Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones offer significant upgrades to prior models by adding a nearly edge-to-edge screen on the larger ...

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• 13 October

  Can robot drivers be taught to anticipate human behaviour?

  

  Bloomberg Robot cars make for annoying drivers. Relative to human motorists, the driverless vehicles now undergoing testing on public roads are overly cautious, maddeningly slow, and prone to abrupt halts or bizarre paralysis caused by bikers, joggers, crosswalks or anything else that doesn’t fit within the neat confines of binary robot brains. Self-driving companies are well aware of the problem, ...

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• 13 October

  Quantitative tightening not so frightening, even as stocks sink

  

  Bloomberg US President Donald Trump is not alone in blaming the Federal Reserve for this week’s tumble in stocks, as many investors attribute the ebbing of easy money for spurring an outbreak of market turmoil. With Bloomberg Economics declaring October as the month the world’s major central banks together start running down their bond holdings, the withdrawal of liquidity is ...

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