April, 2018

• 7 April

  Russian envoy seeks to meet UK’s Johnson over spy case

  MOSCOW / Reuters The Russian embassy in London has sent a request for a meeting of its envoy, Alexander Yakovenko, with British foreign minister Boris Johnson to discuss the investigation of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter poisoned in Salisbury, the RIA news agency reported on Saturday. “We hope for a constructive response from the British side and are counting ...

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• 7 April

  Palestinians clash with Israeli troops along Gaza border

  

  GAZA / Agencies A Palestinian journalist died on Saturday after being wounded by Israeli fire while covering deadly protests along the Israel-Gaza border, health officials said. Yaser Murtaja, 30, a cameraman for Palestinian Ain Me-dia, was the 29th Palestinian killed in the week-long protests. Photos showed Murtaja lying wounded on a stretcher wearing a navy-blue protective vest marked ‘PRESS’ in ...

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• 7 April

  Aussie voters want Turnbull as PM, poll shows

  

  MELBOURNE / Reuters Australian voters want Malcolm Turnbull to remain prime minister, according to an opinion poll on Saturday, as questions about his leadership gain momentum with his coalition facing possibly the 30th straight loss in a major poll on Monday. Losing 30 Newspolls, one of the country’s most respected political polls, would be a symbolic blow for Turnbull since ...

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• 7 April

  How to really push back against fake economics

  

  Fake News is a charge that US President Donald Trump routinely levels at mainstream news outlets reporting truths he prefers not to hear. So when economists cry foul—complaining about blasphemy and quackery among would-be practitioners—our first instinct should be a little scepticism about the charge of Fake Economics. Isn’t this just a famously insular and recently maligned profession simply closing ...

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• 7 April

  Deutsche Bank’s infighting has a cost

  

  As Deutsche Bank AG hurries to rearrange the deckchairs in its boardroom, the firm is losing market share in some of its most important investment banking divisions. If something doesn’t change soon, there won’t be much of a business left for its new directors to oversee. In international bond underwriting, the largest fixed-income category for which Bloomberg compiles league tables, ...

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• 7 April

  Macron’s battle to get France back on track

  

  French President Emmanuel Macron’s fight with public-sector rail workers will show how serious he is about economic reform. Unions are promising two days of disruption each week unless the president abandons his plan to expose the network to a whiff of economic reality. Macron should stand his ground. A government-commissioned report published in February showed just how badly France’s rail ...

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• 7 April

  What the world’s markets can expect next from China

  Trade tensions between the US and China have escalated to the point where each side has slapped tariffs on imports. The logical question is: What now? Although a deal between the two countries will be reached by the end of May, China is expected to announce policies that attempt to mitigate any economic downside resulting from the trade frictions. Those ...

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• 7 April

  Something is lost when companies stay private

  

  The corporation is a societal construct; we give limited liability and other rights to the corporate form, but we expect something of corporations too. Private markets are the new public markets. That’s a thing that I say a lot, but here is a front-page The Wall Street Journal article about it: “At least $2.4 trillion was raised privately in the ...

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• 7 April

  Our robot overlords might be delayed

  

  Are you stressed out about the singularity? Living in fear of the day when computers decide that humans are no longer necessary? Not to worry, say some leading experts in artificial intelligence: Research in the field might have actually hit a wall. No doubt, AI is everywhere. Computers assess financial news, identify viruses and even act as physics theorists, analyzing ...

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• 7 April

  Facebook’s present is as scary as its checkered past

  

  The fresh disclosures about the Cambridge Analytica affair are dismaying for Facebook Inc., and they were getting a lot of deserved attention last week. But what happened at the shadowy political consulting firm is largely about Facebook’s past. The company made other changes that highlighted how lax it is currently being in allowing access to information from the social network’s ...

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