August, 2018

• 12 August

  Generic drugmakers struggle despite US push for copycats

  

  Bloomberg Generic drugmakers are being crushed by the very forces that the Trump administration is counting on to drive down prescription costs. While policy makers are betting that opening the market to a deluge of new medicines and reforming the drug supply chain will help contain rising prices, many widely used copycat medications are already seeing their prices fall at ...

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• 12 August

  EU loses to Canada for No. 3 wheat exporter title due to summer

  

  Bloomberg Europe’s wheat loss is a win for Canadian farmers. After a scorching summer fried wheat crops across the European Union, the bloc is set to lose its position as the world’s third-largest exporter as Canada usurps the title, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The agency cut its outlook for EU wheat exports by 16 percent to a ...

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• 12 August

  US workers got a pay cut in economy Trump calls great

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump has presided over an accelerating economy and the lowest unemployment in years, but American workers still aren’t seeing it in their wallets. US average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation fell 0.2 percent in July from a year earlier, data showed, notching the lowest reading since 2012. While inflation isn’t high in historical terms, after years of ...

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• 12 August

  KKR to bulk up growth-equity group with New York-based hires

  

  Bloomberg KKR & Co. is expanding its growth-equity group, adding to its New York office under the leadership of Erica Martin. The firm will add four or five people to the team focusing on technology, media and telecommunications in the next couple of months, according to Martin, who joined earlier this year from buyout firm Warburg Pincus. KKR had about ...

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• 12 August

  Why Trump’s trade war may be destined to fail

  

  When all is said and done, President Trump’s trade war may be fated to fail. There are many reasons why. One is that the target countries — prominently, China, Japan and Germany — won’t accede to his demands. This is already happening. Another threat is a backlash among US firms, hurt by tariffs that raise their products’ prices. This, too, ...

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• 12 August

  Google ads could soon be on billboard

  

  Google may be about to pair all that data it has on users’ web browsing with the ads displayed on public billboards. Creepy? Maybe. Inevitable? Almost certainly. The Alphabet Inc unit is in talks in Germany about pushing into out-of-home advertising – billboards in stations, shopping centers and shop windows – according to Wirtschafts Woche. The move would be a ...

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• 12 August

  From Amazon to Alibaba, grocers’ pain is endless

  Want to know what Amazon.com Inc. will be doing in physical retail tomorrow? Look at what is happening in China today. If you’d taken this advice, you wouldn’t have been surprised when the behemoth spent $13.7 billion last year buying Whole Foods. Eighteen months earlier Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. had launched Hema, a technologically advanced blend of online grocery shopping, ...

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• 12 August

  Global banks are not as safe as they think

  In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, regulators around the world have taken steps which, they argue, have greatly strengthened the resilience of the financial system. Buoyant asset prices and rising bank shares suggest that investors largely believe them. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain. That will only become clear in a real downturn, rather than ...

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• 12 August

  The long unravelling of Tesla’s master plan

  

  While this week’s episode of Tesla Inc has left us with several cliffhangers, it did show one thing: just how far the company has veered from Elon Musk’s secret “Master Plan” of 2006. Musk summarised it at the top of an updated version — ”Part Deux” — published in 2016: 1 Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be ...

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• 12 August

  The reason to worry when public firms disappear

  

  Public corporations are an odd hybrid institution. They’re not really public in the sense of the government having a stake in them — they’re privately owned companies that follow government standards for financial reporting. In theory, this transparency makes them suitable for the public to invest in. Again in theory, this confers at least two benefits on a company. Financial ...

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