January, 2018

• 21 January

  Iraqi PM meets Kurd leader for first time since referendum vote

  BAGHDAD / Reuters Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani for the first time since conflict broke out over a Kurdish independence referendum, officials said. The Kurdish referendum on Sept. 25, which produced an overwhelming ‘yes’ for independence, angered Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbours Turkey and Iran, which have their own restive Kurdish ...

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• 21 January

  China and the global race for knowledge

  

  The National Science Foundation and the National Science Board have just released their biennial ‘Science & Engineering Indicators,’ a voluminous document describing the state of American technology. There are facts and figures on research and development, innovation and engineers. But the report’s main conclusion lies elsewhere: China has become — or is on the verge of becoming — a scientific ...

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• 21 January

  Venezuela has some bad news and some really bad news

  

  I think we can all agree that, absent a war or some deliberate strategy, a 14 percent drop in a country’s oil production in the space of one year is not a good thing. Even worse, though, is a 29 percent drop. These two realities, both undesirable, were presented for Venezuela in OPEC’s latest monthly report, out recently. The oil-exporters’ ...

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• 21 January

  Forget about Bitcoin, cash is TSMC’s real future

  

  If you’re hung up on the potential upside (or pitfalls) of Bitcoin mining for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., then you may be missing an even bigger story. Cash. Yup, good old cash. You remember the stuff; it’s used for tipping bellhops, filling red envelopes and shoving under mattresses. TSMC, which makes chips for Apple Inc. and for Bitcoin miners, is ...

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• 21 January

  High 2018 yields don’t mean market turmoil

  The performance of US Treasuries in 2017 confounded many, as the bonds kept to range-bound trading in the context of both higher growth and rate tightening by the Federal Reserve that went beyond initial market expectations. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the recent move up in yields has triggered so many reactions, including warnings that we may ...

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• 21 January

  How to keep a billion-dollar fortune in family, Korea style

  

  What to do if you’re a 95-year-old billionaire and you live in a country with inheritance taxes as high as 65 percent? That’s the challenge facing the family of coffee baron Kim Jae-myeong, honorary chairman of Dongsuh group, who built a fortune valued at $2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Kim, who’s never appeared on an international wealth ranking, ...

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• 21 January

  In Brexit Britain, at least death is getting cheaper

  

  What do carpets and coffins have in common? They are both suffering as the internet makes prices more transparent and consumers shop around. That’s the message from both Carpetright Plc, which has been floored by a slump in demand, and funeral director Dignity Plc, whose earnings will be six feet under this year. Analysts’ expectations for Dignity’s 2018 earnings are ...

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• 21 January

  France doesn’t need any bank consolidation

  

  As the world watches to see if Emmanuel Macron succeeds in shaking France out of its statist torpor, it should bear in mind that he would first need to somehow bypass the country’s entrenched mandarins, the elite-educated cadre that run France’s most important bureaucracies and whose cohorts tend to have leadership roles throughout French industry; they often have the biggest ...

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• 21 January

  Draghi task force plan for euro safe assets ‘ready’

  

  Bloomberg The design for a new class of safe financial assets intended to strengthen the euro area will be published imminently after almost a year of delay, according to officials familiar with the matter. The report, commissioned by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, will offer a plan for bundling government debt from the bloc’s 19 nations into a security ...

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• 21 January

  Fed’s Quarles seeks to ease bank rules

  

  Bloomberg Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Randal Quarles, the central bank’s supervision chief, shared a laundry list of ways to make regulation less burdensome for Wall Street — including streamlining capital rules, overhauling post-crisis trading limits and making major changes to how the agency conducts stress tests. “Confusion that results from overly complex regulation does not advance the goal of a ...

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