February, 2018

• 4 February

  Commonsense immigration policy for the 21st century

  

  We are a nation of immigrants who are uneasy about immigration. There is a long history of resentment against immigrants, dating to the Irish immigrants in the 1840s and the Chinese a few decades later. This contrasts with our demonstrated ability to absorb newcomers. It’s time to overcome this two-headed legacy with an immigration policy for the 21st century. What ...

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• 4 February

  Its better to call your tax lawyer first before investing in India

  

  Just as foreign stock investors in India try to come to terms with a rudely reimposed 10% tax on long-term capital gains, a bigger shock awaits them. The grandfathering of past returns promised by Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech last week is missing from the fine print of the bill. Well, it’s not completely missing. The ...

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• 4 February

  A better way to disrupt the healthcare system

  Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase say they’re putting their heads together to make health care better and less expensive for their employees. Just possibly, it’s a partnership that could disrupt the US health-care system — in a good way. The market value of insurance companies and pharmacy-benefit managers dropped on the announcement, a sign that investors think the alliance ...

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• 4 February

  Bank of Japan is missing a big opportunity

  It’s almost as though there’s too much good news in Japan. So much that some investors are starting to expect the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to lay groundwork for easing off its stimulus — and the central bank is falling over itself to convince them that policy is not going to change anytime soon. My, how things have changed! Instead ...

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• 4 February

  Bitcoin is the new gold for the cryptocurrency age

  

  I hate to say I told you so, but … well, I told you so. Bitcoin, while still a popular financial asset, is looking less and less like a currency. Online payments company Stripe is ending Bitcoin support. It cites several reasons for doing so: “[Bitcoin] transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase ...

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• 4 February

  Facebook makes it tougher to gauge its popularity

  

  There’s an evolving mystery about Facebook: How are we supposed to measure its popularity now? On January 31, Facebook initially spooked investors by disclosing the slowest growth rate of daily users in its history and a 5 percent decline in the amount of time people spent on the social network in the final quarter of 2017. The company’s stock price ...

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• 4 February

  Coal mining’s great jobs boom has been postponed

  

  President Donald Trump talked a lot about coal mining during his campaign, and he has kept talking about it since. “We have ended the war on clean coal,” he declared in his State of the Union address just this week. I’d take issue with the phrase “clean coal” (more on that later), but it is definitely true that the Trump ...

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• 4 February

  Coeure urges reforms to avoid next crisis testing limits of ECB

  

  Bloomberg European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure urged European governments to push ahead with plans to strengthen monetary union to avoid stretching his institution’s mandate in the next crisis. “Without further reforms, the next crisis may well force the ECB to test the limits of its mandate,” he said in a speech near Ljubljana, Slovenia. “To assume that ...

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• 4 February

  BOE rate hike likely in May if Brexit transition agreed

  Bloomberg UBS AG brought forward its forecast for the next UK interest-rate increase, though it also sounded a warning bell about such a move. Bank of England policy makers will raise their benchmark by 25 points at their May meeting, strategist John Wraith wrote in a report dated January 31. In forecasts published after the BOE’s November rate hike, UBS ...

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• 4 February

  EU’s biggest hawks raise rates

  Bloomberg Czech policy makers raised borrowing costs for the third time in six months to cool one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies and unveiled a hotly anticipated outlook predicting a surge in the currency. The Czech National Bank’s board voted unanimously to increase the benchmark interest rate a quarter point to 0.75 percent, Governor Jiri Rusnok said. The fresh forecasts, which ...

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