February, 2018

• 11 February

  Trinity Mirror buys rival UK tabloids for $177mn

  

  Bloomberg Trinity Mirror Plc is buying rival Express and Star tabloids for 126.7 million pounds ($177 million), a milestone deal as Britain’s declining print media outlets seek scale to adapt to the shift of readers and advertisers online. “In a world of big global digital platforms, in a challenged industry, scale matters,” Simon Fox, chief executive officer of the publisher ...

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• 11 February

  A stronger dollar is just what America needs

  

  Until recently, President Donald Trump had wanted a weaker dollar because he romanticizes manufacturing. A weaker currency has been a temptation for world leaders since the early days of industrialization, as it’s generally believed it will provide a boost to exports and stimulate the economy in the short run. We all remember the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that led to competitive devaluations, ...

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• 11 February

  Flipkart can bring in muscle to save money, live better

  

  Flipkart’s bringing in the big guns. India’s leading e-commerce company looks set to team up with Walmart Inc., garnering the startup a valuation of as much as $20 billion in return for a stake that could be as large as 20%, Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai reported recently. There’s a lot that Flipkart Online Services Pvt could do with around $4 billion ...

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• 11 February

  Sterling is soaring on imaginary smooth-Brexit

  

  No doubt about it — The Bank of England is hawkish, and it is ready to embark on a rate-hiking cycle. Sterling took an instant leap higher to the dollar, and 10-year gilt yields rose to the highest levels seen since April 2016. Governor Mark Carney and the rest of the Monetary Policy Committee are leaving a lot to chance ...

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• 11 February

  SpaceX once again achieves something unreasonable

  ‘It seems surreal to me,’ said Elon Musk, proprietor of SpaceX, and for once he was understating things. On Fenruary 6, his company blasted a 230-foot rocket into orbit, returned its two side boosters to Earth for a flawlessly synchronized landing, and — with exquisite nerd flair — propelled Musk’s own Tesla Roadster toward deep space, where it’s expected to ...

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• 11 February

  The UK is down since Brexit, guess who’s up

  

  When British voters decided in June 2016 to exit the European Union, investors who had anticipated the opposite result stampeded out of sterling and the currency plummeted a record 8.05 percent to a 31-year low. Almost 20 months later, the pound has mostly recovered, providing some satisfaction to commentators who’d predicted that Brexit would prove more distressing to the EU. ...

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• 11 February

  The stock market is a lot like Bitcoin

  

  Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market’s rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines—and blame them, too. Last year, Marko Kolanovic, global head of quantitative and derivative research at JPMorgan, estimated that ...

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• 11 February

  This copycat biotech rally should carry a health warning

  

  Biotech is bursting back to life in the US, and the enthusiasm is being felt across the Pacific. The crown jewel of the rally in Asia is South Korea’s Celltrion Inc., whose shares have soared 43 percent in the first month of 2018. While the surge has been driven partly by the stock’s impending upgrade from the small-and-mid-cap Kosdaq index ...

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• 11 February

  Hedge-fund investors embrace Europe as economic woes retreat

  

  Bloomberg Europe is suddenly the hot market for hedge-fund investment. After years of being overlooked, the continent is attracting capital from investors who want to take advantage of a recovering economy as the last effects of the euro-zone debt crisis disappear. Buyers are also piling in to diversify portfolios swelled by the stock-market boom — which after this week’s correction ...

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• 11 February

  US junk-bond market sees worst loss in 2 yrs

  

  Bloomberg A selloff in the market for speculative-grade corporate bonds accelerated amid turmoil in the stock market, handing investors their worst weekly loss since the oil slump two years ago. The bonds lost 1.5 percent on the week, the worst performance since February 2016, Bloomberg Barclays index data show. The average spread on high-yield bonds — or the premium investors ...

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