June, 2018

• 9 June

  Trump breaks with G-7 to urge Russia return

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump said Russia should be allowed back into the G-8 bloc, lobbing another point of friction into an-already fraught summit with allies in Canada. “Russia should be in this meeting,” Trump told reporters in Washington as he left the White House to fly to Canada. “Whether you like it or not, and it may not be politically ...

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• 9 June

  Mueller bolsters Manafort case with ‘spy’ charges

  

  Bloomberg US Special Counsel Robert Mueller strengthened his case against Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort with new charges filed on June 08. He also stoked intrigue by adding a new name to his indictment against Manafort — a longtime Manafort associate who prosecutors have said has ties to Russian intelligence. The superseding indictment Mueller’s team filed in Washington ...

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• 9 June

  Kim impersonator snared in Singapore security net

  

  Bloomberg If Singapore’s reputation for tight security was one reason the real Kim Jong-un agreed to hold his summit with Donald Trump in the city-state, the fake Kim Jong-un now knows why. A Hong Kong-based entertainer who impersonates the North Korean leader said he was detained at Changi Airport after returning to Singapore ahead of the summit on Tuesday. The ...

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• 9 June

  Soros ‘campaign’ calls on voters to target MPs on Brexit

  

  Bloomberg The anti-Brexit campaign group backed by billionaire George Soros called on British voters to pressure members of Parliament to force a referendum on the government’s divorce deal with the European Union. Best for Britain, which receives about 20 percent of its funding from Soros, wants a “national conversation” about Brexit and its effects to help trigger a second vote ...

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• 9 June

  Democrats need to find their voice on tariffs

  

  Is President Trump’s pitch to disgruntled manufacturing workers a leading political indicator, portending future trends, or a lagging one, appealing to a small and declining segment of the public? We may be about to find out, thanks to Trump’s controversial tariff plan. Trump’s decision last week to levy duties on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico seems, ...

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• 9 June

  Fear China put nobody’s talking about

  

  For all the talk of China’s mountain of debt, defaults and deleveraging, there’s a chasm nobody is talking about. Here’s an alarming and frequently cited statistic: Chinese industrial companies have at least $124 billion of debt maturing over the next two years. Actually, it’s worse. They have another $34 billion of bonds with put options – giving creditors the right ...

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• 9 June

  How the G-6 can ‘discreetly’ get Trump to back down

  Never before has a US president worked so hard to isolate his country from its friends. The G-7 summit of advanced economies that started on Friday in Quebec sees Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK united in opposition to Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policy. The problem goes deeper than a first round of tariffs and counter-tariffs, because Trump’s ...

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• 9 June

  Italy needs the euro exit plan. So do other nations

  While the turmoil in Italy has died down, at least for now, the issue that set it off is sure to provoke more tumult ahead. The populist coalition that won the last election had proposed to make Paolo Savona, an economist who has said Italy should have a “Plan B” to exit the euro, finance minister. Sergio Mattarella, the country’s ...

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• 9 June

  Air India debacle shows Modi doesn’t get business

  

  When Narendra Modi took office as India’s prime minister just over four years ago, a top priority for the economic reformers who had supported his candidacy was the privatization of India’s incredibly inefficient public sector. Among their biggest targets was the state-run airline, Air India — a clunky, loss-making behemoth that has long been rendered irrelevant by buzzy domestic competitors. ...

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• 9 June

  ‘Accor should give more back to shareholders’

  

  Imagine you run a hotel group that’s just sold a controlling stake in its property portfolio so it can pursue a fashionable “asset-light” strategy. What’s the most logical way to deploy some of the 4.6 billion euros ($5.4 billion) of capital released by that transaction to maximize investor returns? Maybe not buying a chunky stake in a strike-prone, heavily indebted, ...

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