October, 2018

• 27 October

  ‘Trump reviewing tariffs on Canada steel, Aluminum’

  

  Bloomberg The US, Canada and Mexico remain at odds over metals tariffs, with Donald Trump’s envoy to Canada saying the president is reviewing them. Trump’s ambassador, Kelly Craft, argued the levies on steel and aluminum imports were designed to prevent overseas metal from entering America via its neighbors. “That is not something that is against Canada,” Craft said at an ...

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• 27 October

  US economy sees business-spending slump

  

  Bloomberg Consumers drove the US economy to better-than-expected growth in the third quarter, but a steep slowdown in business spending raised concerns about whether the strength in the expansion is sustainable. The 3.5 percent annualised gain in gross domestic product, following 4.2 percent, marked the best back-to-back quarters since 2014, according to Commerce Department report. The rise in consumer spending, ...

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• 27 October

  UK traders acquitted of rigging currency market

  Bloomberg Three former British traders were found not guilty of using an online chatroom to fix prices in the $5.1 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. A federal jury in New York rejected the government’s claim that Richard Usher, Rohan Ramchandani and Christopher Ashton, a group known as “The Cartel,” rigged the market from 2007 to 2013 by coordinating trades and manipulating ...

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• 27 October

  Twitter exceeds sales projections in third quarter

  

  Bloomberg Twitter Inc. topped estimates for earnings and revenue in the third quarter amid higher spending from advertisers, marking a much-needed boost for the social-networking site after months of scrutiny from lawmakers and criticism about fake or offensive accounts. The shares rose in early trading. Monthly active users averaged 326 million, San Francisco-based Twitter said in a statement. That’s a ...

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• 27 October

  Swedish confidence dips on economic slowdown concern

  Bloomberg Swedes became more pessimistic as the central bank prepares to raise interest rates for the first time in seven years and politicians struggle to form a government more than a month after the nation’s inconclusive election. The economic tendency indicator fell to 108.0 in October from 111.2 in September, the National Institute of Economic Research said. Analysts surveyed by ...

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• 27 October

  America has lost its entrepreneurial edge

  

  Globalisation strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship. For decades, promoting startup firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, ...

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• 27 October

  BT’s new boss goes into lion’s den

  

  BT Group Plc’s pick to replace its boss Gavin Patterson, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co., is Philip Jansen, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble Co. Indeed, it was Jansen – currently co-CEO at Worldpay Inc. – who first brought Patterson into the telecoms world, hiring him at the turn of the millennium for a ...

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• 27 October

  Banks might have started worrying about Brexit

  

  For a long time, bankers’ concerns about the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) didn’t seem to have much effect on London’s role as a global financial hub. That might be changing. One measure of London’s prominence is the amount of international lending that originates in the UK. A German bank, for example, might provide financing to an Irish ...

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• 27 October

  A bridge alone can’t unify Hong Kong with China

  What’s the most important bit of infrastructure to connect an international metropolis like China’s Pearl River Delta? A demolished border post. For all the excitement around the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge last week, that’s probably the best lesson to draw from Beijing’s plan to draw Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan and other cities into a single megalopolis. ...

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• 27 October

  Best hope for Italian bonds may be coalition’s collapse

  

  As Italy digs in to resist European Union (EU) demands for budget moderation, some investors say only one thing can reverse the government’s spiraling borrowing costs: the collapse of the populist administration. The coalition’s determination to ramp up spending has pushed the yield on Italian bonds to highs not seen since the euro-area debt crisis. As long as the nation’s ...

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