April, 2018

• 21 April

  Billion-dollar Brazil utility fight heats up with new bids

  Bloomberg The bidding war for Brazil’s prized Eletropaulo SA utility is heating up with two European power giants looking to best each other’s bids. Italy’s Enel SpA said it would increase a promised capital injection to 1.5 billion Brazilian reais ($443 million) to sweeten its 28 reais-a-share offer for the AES Corp. unit. The move came hours after the Brazilian ...

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• 21 April

  Yes, the deficit addiction is a bipartisan norm in US

  

  History is what we make of it — and sometimes we make a real hash. I take as my text for the sermon that follows an op-ed essay in The New York Times this week by Times’ columnist David Leonhardt. The headline tells it all: ‘Democrats, the Real Fiscal Conservatives.’ Are you kidding? It is certainly true, as Leonhardt argues, ...

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• 21 April

  4,000,000 reasons to back China biotech

  

  Anyone who doubts China could produce the next Roche Holding AG or Pfizer Inc. need only look at the country’s cancer figures: More than 4 million new patients or close to 12,000 per day diagnosed in 2015, the latest public data available. Global investors have settled on a favored contender in Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co., whose Shanghai-traded shares have surged ...

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• 21 April

  Wells Fargo may not be done paying for its misdeeds

  

  Wells Fargo & Co.’s $1 billion settlement with regulators already has some saying that this marks the end of a troubled period for the scandal-plagued bank. That might be wishful thinking. Part of the reason for the optimism is the size of the fine. Wells Fargo paid only $185 million for its fake-account scandal, which impacted as many as 3.5 ...

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• 21 April

  Trump stress-tests the world economy

  Taking stock of the global economy as finance ministers and central-bank governors gathered in Washington for its spring meetings, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found reason for concern. “[R]isks beyond the next several quarters clearly lean to the downside,” it reports. Well, that’s hardly unusual — the IMF exists to be concerned. Rarely, though, has it had better grounds. To ...

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• 21 April

  India’s banking system needs a stronger watchdog

  

  To many economists, the solution to India’s bad-loan crisis appears as obvious as the problem: Privatize state-owned banks, which have racked up billions more in soured loans and performed much worse than their private-sector counterparts. Yet, unless the government first strengthens its ability to supervise all banks, public and private, selling some of them off will be slim guarantee against ...

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• 21 April

  No, the UK won’t rejoin Europe anytime soon

  

  Outside of Britain it’s commonly assumed that the country regrets its decision to leave Europe. Indeed European Parliament Brexit Representative Guy Verhofstadt suggested recently that one day the UK might rejoin the EU. It’s also a view some inside Britain cling to as well; and yet there’s very little evidence to support it. Ever since the Brexit vote in June ...

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• 21 April

  Mexico and its workers didn’t hit the jackpot with Nafta

  

  Since 1993, the year before the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) went into effect, per capita gross domestic product in Mexico is up about 26 percent in real terms. That’s a lot better than the outright decline in per capita GDP that the country had experienced over the course of the 1980s. But it’s nowhere close to the 41 ...

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• 21 April

  ECB sees scope to wait until July meeting to signal QE end

  

  Bloomberg European Central Bank policy makers see scope to wait until their July meeting to announce how they’ll end their bond-buying program, according to euro-area officials familiar with the matter. Governing Council members want sufficient time to judge if the economy is overcoming its first-quarter slowdown, the officials said, asking not to be identified because the internal deliberations are confidential. ...

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• 21 April

  Number of German banks declines as fintechs attack

  

  Bloomberg Even before Bundesbank will publish its annual statistics on the consolidation in the German banking industry in May, there are already indications that the total number of banks and branches has dropped even further. Banks from abroad or those focussing on very specific customer groups are among the few that are expanding. The number of savings and cooperative banks, ...

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