July, 2018

• 21 July

  G-20 draft cites growing trade tension, diplomatically

  

  Bloomberg Delegates at the Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank chiefs began the delicate task of addressing growing trade tensions without upsetting US President Donald Trump. Negotiators drafting the summit’s final statement in Buenos Aires worked on language that would reiterate a positive global economic outlook while highlighting risks, including the escalating dispute over trade, according ...

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• 21 July

  EU prepares to retaliate over car tariffs before Trump talks

  

  Bloomberg The European Union (EU) is preparing a new list of American goods to hit with protective measures if a mission to Washington fails to persuade US President Donald Trump not to raise levies on car imports. “If the US would impose these car tariffs that would be very unfortunate but we are preparing together with our member states a ...

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• 21 July

  Canada’s economy strengthens in Q2

  Bloomberg Canada’s economy is proving increasingly robust in the second quarter, with inflation and retail sales coming in ahead of economists’ expectations. The consumer price index rose at an annual pace of 2.5% in June, the fastest year-over-year acceleration since 2012, Statistics Canada said. Economists in a Bloomberg survey anticipated a 2.3% increase. In a separate report, the agency said ...

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• 21 July

  Google is quietly working on a successor to Android

  

  Bloomberg For more than two years, a small and stealthy group of engineers within Google has been working on software that they hope will eventually replace Android, the world’s dominant mobile operating system. As the team grows, it will have to overcome some fierce internal debate about how the software will work. The project, known as Fuchsia, was created from ...

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• 21 July

  Trump and the coming wars over welfare

  

  The Trump administration may have declared it over, but a new War on Poverty is coming anyways. It will be fought largely over the “work requirement” — should the government require welfare recipients either to get a job or to train for one? It’s a philosophical as much as a practical question. A work requirement addresses a dilemma of all ...

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• 21 July

  Morgan Stanley loosens purse strings

  

  Morgan Stanley is, all of a sudden, Wall Street’s big spender. The Wall Street firm reported second-quarter earnings that were broadly better than expected. Most notable was Morgan Stanley’s fixed-income and commodities trading, which beat expectations. Rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc missed in that unit, where it had once dominated Morgan Stanley, but the fortunes of the two firms have ...

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• 21 July

  Three strikes should rule out UK rate hike

  The interest-rate futures market is convinced the Bank of England will raise borrowing costs next month. But three consecutive sets of disappointing economic statistics this week should restrain the hawks on the Monetary Policy Committee from turning the present political and economic drama into a crisis. The pound lurched lower, dropping below $1.30, after disappointing retail sales figures. The combination ...

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• 21 July

  EU is fighting the last tech war against Google

  The greatest hope of European regulators cracking down on Google’s business practices is that the rest of the world becomes a little more like China and its flourishing technology industry. It’s hard to imagine the European bureaucrats’ dreams will come true. In China, government restrictions and Google’s strategic decisions have left the country’s technology market to operate almost free from ...

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• 21 July

  China invents a different way to run an economy

  

  In the US and other developed countries, there are three basic philosophies of macroeconomic stabilisation. Each of them was present in some form during the Great Depression, and each survives to this day. The first is Keynesianism, which centers around fiscal stimulus, mainly in the form of increased government spending. The second is monetarism, which holds that getting economies out ...

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• 21 July

  A whiff of rotten eggs may augur oil shock

  

  What’s the most important element in global commodity markets right now? Carbon? Copper? Gold? Wrong on all three counts. Sulfur — the yellow, infernal substance that gives rotten eggs their smell and hardens the rubber in car tires — is quietly roiling the energy industry. The disruptions could reshape everything from Australian coal, to the diesel and gasoline in your ...

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