March, 2018

• 19 March

  ‘Huge’ trade deficits are smaller than you think

  

  There are many good economic reasons why President Donald Trump is wrong to obsess over the US trade deficit with China. One is that this bilateral deficit isn’t as severe as he thinks — and, in any case, the structural factors that caused the imbalance in the first place are changing. Before launching a US-China trade war, the White House ...

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• 19 March

  UBS’s pain will be Hong Kong’s gain

  

  Hong Kong has used UBS Group AG to send a harsh message to investment banks: Take your job as a gateway to initial public offerings seriously. With deals starting to boom again and the city’s exchange planning to allow dual-class shares, regulators are right to adopt a tougher stance. The Securities and Futures Commission suspended UBS from sponsoring Hong Kong ...

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• 19 March

  Italy’s got political problems, but its bonds don’t care much

  

  The March 4 Italian elections have produced a lot of drama, an equity-market selloff, and as yet no sign of a government — but in the bond market, stability should prevail. Ten-year Italian yields have held close to 2 percent all year so far. Of course, there was always going to be a benefit from the European Central Bank’s (ECB) quantitative ...

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• 19 March

  Blocking Qualcomm deal was the right thing to do

  President Donald Trump’s decision to quash an overseas bid for Qualcomm Inc. was almost certainly the right thing to do. That it came with little warning and not much explanation, however, suggests some significant flaws in the way the US evaluates such deals. Broadcom Ltd., based in Singapore, had made an unsolicited $117 billion offer to acquire Qualcomm, a leading ...

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• 19 March

  Uber finds itself bogged down in a land war in Asia

  

  Here’s a useful lesson: Don’t believe what CEOs say, only what they do. This is what Uber’s top executive said three weeks ago: “We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively,” according to an account of Dara Khosrowshahi’s press briefing in New Delhi. “Right now the plan for Southeast Asia is to go forward, lean ...

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• 19 March

  To improve gender balance in finance, tie targets to pay

  

  The Women in Finance Charter, an initiative from the UK Treasury to improve gender balance in the finance industry, just released its first progress report. Frankly, it makes for depressing reading. But there’s a glimmer of hope in one of the remedies it proposes. Signatories to the charter include asset management firms such as Schroders Plc, banks like Barclays Plc, ...

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• 19 March

  The worldwide population bomb has been defused

  

  Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass ...

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• 19 March

  Saudi tweaks loan deposit policy to allow more lending

  

  DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s central bank has instructed banks to change the way they calculate their loan-to-deposit ratios, giving greater weight to long-term deposits in order to permit more lending, according to a report on the Maaal financial news website. The new rules, set to come into effect in early April, will introduce a weighting system for calculating a ...

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• 19 March

  China’s new monetary chief says he’ll keep to Zhou’s reform path

  

  Bloomberg China’s incoming central bank governor, Yi Gang, signalled that he’ll push to maintain the course of financial liberalisation set by his predecessor Zhou Xiaochuan. The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, voted to approve President Xi Jinping’s choice for governor of the People’s Bank of China. Liu He, Xi’s top economic adviser, was named as a vice premier, indicating that ...

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• 19 March

  Citigroup seeks to close gender gap in Asia unit

  

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. wants to achieve parity between male and female managing directors at its markets business in Asia within three to five years, joining banks worldwide in stepping up efforts to close a longstanding gender gap. The New York-based bank has a long way to go. Though women make up about half the 60,000 Citigroup workforce across all divisions ...

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