July, 2018

• 2 July

  Tesla finally hits Model 3 production target

  

  Bloomberg Tesla Inc. reached a milestone critical to Elon Musk’s goal to bring electric cars to the masses — and earn some profit in the process — by finally exceeding a long-sought production target with the Model 3. By building more than 5,000 of the sedans in the last week of the second quarter, Tesla “just became a real car ...

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• 2 July

  On-call work schedules make it hard to have a life

  

  In recent months, a number of big, bold proposals have been advanced to relieve economic pressure on the poor, including a federal job guarantee, a universal basic income and single-payer health care. But a lot of more modest but still important ideas are being overlooked. One of these is the idea of stable work scheduling. Over the years, many employers, ...

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• 2 July

  Want real stress? Try bad loans in India

  

  Imagine India’s GDP growth had collapsed to 3%; inflation was about to hit double digits; exports were tanking; and the country’s twin deficits—in the government’s budget, and in the nation’s current account—were out of control. It’s only when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tries to imagine such a dire scenario for March 2019 that its simulation exercise for bad ...

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• 2 July

  Thailand leads in crypto by skipping big debate

  Securities, or not securities. That is the crypto question. Except in Thailand. While regulators around the world have grappled with the issue of what category digital currencies and assets fall into, Thailand has skipped the debate altogether. Instead, using an emergency decree that came into effect earlier this year, authorities wrote an entirely new law. The result is the Digital ...

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• 2 July

  Tax and spend is the new game in Brexit Britain

  British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond and Bank of England chief Mark Carney are a two-man Brexit juggling act, valiantly trying to convince the outside world that they can keep the UK from crashing to earth. The duo have survived political mud-slinging by Brexiteers, a faltering economy and heavy criticism of deep cuts to public spending (Hammond) and historically ...

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• 2 July

  What an Amazon pharmacy could solve and what it won’t

  

  If Amazon’s move to disrupt health care is going to make Americans any healthier, the improvement is most likely to take place in the business of getting prescription drugs to patients more reliably. For one thing, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Failure to take prescription drugs kills about 125,000 Americans a year, according to a recent review in the ...

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• 2 July

  London’s bankers are an unproductive bunch

  

  Being a banker in London is probably the very definition of belonging to “the 1 percent.” Yet only one in three is satisfied with his or her pay, according to one survey. Considering the stagnant productivity in the city’s finance sector, perhaps they should be more grateful. Britain as a whole has been a productivity laggard since the financial crisis, ...

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• 2 July

  Solving the ocean plastic crisis starts with Asia

  

  Since January 1, when China stopped accepting the rich world’s recyclable plastic waste, it’s gotten a ton of criticism for worsening the already deep crisis of ocean plastic pollution. But China isn’t the only culprit here. This is a crisis made — and growing worse — throughout developing Asia. Just eight countries in the region are responsible for about 63 ...

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• 2 July

  Europe banks exploit loophole in key rule to cut $145bn in trades

  

  Bloomberg Some of Europe’s biggest banks may have found a perfectly legal way to exploit a weakness in one of the finance industry’s most loathed rules. Euro-area and Swiss lenders cut their short-term borrowings by tens of billions of dollars just before the end of each quarter, improving their reported financial health, only to build them up again in the ...

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• 2 July

  Indonesia favours rupiah stability above growth in rate move

  

  Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank is showing its willingness to sacrifice economic growth for currency stability in its latest aggressive move on interest rates. Bank Indonesia surprised economists with a bigger-than-forecast 50 basis-point hike, on top of two rate increases in May aimed at halting a currency rout. That takes the benchmark rate to 5.25 percent, with analysts betting there’s more ...

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