January, 2018

• 31 January

  Harley shuts plant as woes worsen

  

  Bloomberg A deepening slump in US motorcycle demand is spurring more job cuts and a plant closure at Harley-Davidson Inc., a company President Donald Trump has cast as a model American manufacturer. The Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker will close its factory in Kansas City, Missouri, and consolidate production in York, Pennsylvania, according to a statement. The restructuring will eliminate about 260 ...

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• 31 January

  Google bets on $1.1bn deal to chase Apple

  

  Bloomberg Google officially closed its $1.1 billion deal with HTC Corp., adding more than 2,000 smartphone specialists in Taiwan to help the search giant chase Apple Inc. in the cut-throat premium handset market. The deal will help Google design more of its own consumer hardware and could set it up to wade deeper into special-purpose chips—like Apple. Google’s most recent ...

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• 31 January

  Thanks to Trump, more milk in US will be coming from robots

  

  Bloomberg The robots are coming—this time, to a dairy farm near you. It wasn’t long ago that cow-milking robots were a novelty in the US, but today, automation is showing up on more farms. One of the big factors spurring the trend: more than half of all workers on dairy farms are immigrants, and the Trump Administration’s hard-line policy stances ...

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• 31 January

  Rising truck demand to strain supply chain

  

  Bloomberg Volvo AB boosted its forecast for truck markets in the US and Europe this year as low fuel prices and interest rates push demand, a development that’s expected to put more strain on an already tight supply chain. The shares rose the most in three months. The world’s second-biggest truckmaker raised its expectation for industrywide North American deliveries by ...

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• 31 January

  Britain has indeed lost its bearings on Brexit

  

  The leaked UK government forecasts of Brexit’s impact on the economy discusses several scenarios, none of them favorable. But the scariest takeaway was that London still isn’t clear on what kind of deal it’s capable of getting, or what it wants. Almost 600 days have passed since the referendum. The three scenarios discussed in the assessment dated January 2018, are ...

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• 31 January

  Trump’s rejection of TPP a disaster

  

  As President Trump prepares to appraise the state of the union, it’s worth remembering what still ranks as one of the worst decisions of his presidency: the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It happened just about a year ago. You’ll recall that the TPP was an agreement between the US and 11 other countries — ...

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• 31 January

  JPMorgan health venture, a hazard to its deal fees

  

  Snubbing JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment bankers may soon become the norm in one pocket of Corporate America. But the bigger picture justifies the sacrifice. The largest US lender said on Tuesday that it’s teaming up with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to lower the cost of US employee health-care coverage. The move sent a shock wave through stocks ...

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• 31 January

  India’s Modi should keep his fiscal promises

  With elections in sight, India’s government is under pressure to loosen fiscal policy in its budget on Thursday. Tempting as this may seem, it would be a mistake. Chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian has made the most candid argument for relaxing the country’s tough fiscal stance: Given the political calendar, promises to honor the targets simply wouldn’t be believed. He ...

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• 31 January

  China, US Treasuries and the temporary truths

  

  In a span of less than 24 hours, we went from a Bloomberg News report last week that China might reduce its exposure to US Treasuries to China’s denial and claims of ‘fake news.’ I suspect the original story and the denial had official backing, with the initial news viewed as a “temporary truth” that would dissipate like a Snapchat ...

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• 31 January

  Ireland should stand on its own two feet

  

  As far as the European Union is concerned, it’s still 2010. If ever there was evidence that officials haven’t got the message that the crisis is over, you need look no further than Ireland. The European Union issued a 2.4 billion-euro ($3 billion) seven-year bond, and the funds will refinance some of Ireland’s bailout borrowings. As is always the case ...

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