January, 2018

• 23 January

  Ban on oil residue a billion-dollar headache for India’s largest refiner

  

  Bloomberg Scraping the bottom of the oil barrel for cheap fuel may be turning into a multi-billion-dollar headache for India’s largest crude refiner. The South Asian nation’s battle against pollution has left Indian Oil Corp. searching for alternative markets to sell petroleum coke, the cheapest and dirtiest among the oil products. A host of new limits on the fuel’s use ...

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• 23 January

  FirstEnergy soars as Elliott leads $2.5 billion investment

  

  Bloomberg FirstEnergy Corp. rose the most in almost a decade after announcing a $2.5 billion equity investment by a group including Elliott Management Corp. As part of the deal, the Akron, Ohio-based utility owner is forming a “restructuring working group” that will seek to minimise the time needed to exit the unregulated power business, according to a statement. The company ...

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• 23 January

  IMF outlook adds to the allure of oil and metals

  

  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently raised its forecasts for global economic growth in 2018 and 2019 to 3.9 percent, which would be the fastest pace since 2011. That is good for global equities, of course, but it is particularly bullish for crude oil prices and industrial metals prices. It also means that a wave of monetary tightening is coming ...

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• 23 January

  Bitcoin is a means of payment

  

  Critics of Bitcoin often argue that it’s useless as a means of payment, one of the key elements of any successful currency. That’s not quite right, and likely to become less so. First, a reminder on how Bitcoin works. If I want to send someone some Bitcoin, I simply broadcast my intention to the network. I then wait for the ...

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• 23 January

  It’s bonus time, so Asia’s put its MiFID fears on hold

  It’s bad form to bring up unpleasant things during bonus season. That’s one of the two reasons the Asian sell-side isn’t talking much about MiFID II. The other is copious liquidity. Make no mistake. Once the great bull market ends and equity trading volumes recede, the margin compression triggered by the European Union’s revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive will ...

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• 23 January

  Another year of rolling back Obamacare

  The year ahead looks to be dangerous for health-care security in the US, as Donald Trump’s administration continues to sabotage the law that Congress couldn’t repeal. New proposals would let many more healthy Americans drop their Obamacare coverage — raising costs for the unhealthy and risks for everyone, sick or well. It will fall to state governments to resist this ...

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• 23 January

  Economics reckons with its gender bias problem

  

  The economics profession’s gender problems came to the fore last year. A number of people had been speaking up about the issue for a while, but this time the concern really boiled over. The spark was a paper by then-undergraduate Alice Wu, highlighting sexist language in an anonymous internet forum used by some economists. But the profession’s gender issues run ...

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• 23 January

  Trump’s solar tariffs are a case of when the levy brakes

  

  It is perhaps fitting that President Donald Trump’s salvo of tariffs on solar-power equipment was unleashed in a press release dropped late on Monday and sporting a headline that actually led with “large residential washing machines.” Why? Because, digging into the impact, the tariffs help to demonstrate one thing: Solar modules— blocks of cells that are put together to make ...

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• 23 January

  Don’t let the social media’s trolls get you down

  

  I began sharing my work online two decades ago as one of the early financial bloggers. I started on Yahoo Geocities in the 1990s, Typepad in 2003, and finally on WordPress at my own domain in 2008. That is where the Big Picture still resides. In those days, blogs had robust comment communities. They were a terrific source of discussion ...

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• 23 January

  Bitcoin ban at Nordea has regulator taking backseat

  

  Bloomberg As Nordea Bank AB blazes a trail in Europe by banning its employees from trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the regulator is taking a back seat in a decision-making process it says is better left to the industry. Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority thinks “every institution must decide on the details of their internal regulations specifying the rules for their ...

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