January, 2018

• 13 January

  Zimbabwe opp mulls future without founder

  Bloomberg Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is in a quandary over whether its long-serving leader and founder Morgan Tsvangirai, who’s undergoing treatment for colon cancer, should retire before this year’s elections. While Tsvangirai, 65, has appeared increasingly frail, he remains the party’s most-popular official and his absence from the ballot could undermine its campaign. The MDC ...

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• 13 January

  Does the Federal Reserve need a new playbook?

  

  The record of economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, over the past half century has been discouraging. The two greatest blunders are well-known: policies that fed double-digit inflation in the 1970s, reaching a peak of 13.5 percent in 1980; and the more recent failure to prevent the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, sending unemployment to 10 percent. Unfortunately, ...

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• 13 January

  Teacher’s pet ripple or bad boy bitcoin?

  

  It’s been almost a month since Wall Street took a step towards adopting Bitcoin as its own with the launch of cash-settled futures contracts. The results haven’t been stellar. Promoted as ‘Gold 2.0,’ Bitcoin hasn’t quite worked out that way: Its price in dollars has fallen by about 20% from a mid-December high, while its volatility climbed to its highest ...

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• 13 January

  JPMorgan Chase is more behemoth and less bank

  JPMorgan Chase & Co., it appears, is outgrowing its bank. The nation’s largest bank by assets reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results. It also crossed a big annual revenue milestone — re-entering the 12-figure club for the first time since 2010. It reported $104 billion for 2017 on an adjusted basis. However, at the same time that JPMorgan is more behemoth than ...

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• 13 January

  Energy policy should focus on climate

  Good sense on energy hasn’t fled Washington entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has struck down the Trump administration’s bewildering proposal to subsidize coal-fired power for its “resilience” in the event of big storms or natural disasters. Making coal cheaper would have damaged health and cost lives by boosting air pollution, and made energy markets less efficient to boot. FERC ...

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• 13 January

  Smart phone addiction is a problem Apple won’t solve

  

  Two big shareholders of Apple Inc. are right to add their influential voices to those concerned with smartphone addiction. If they are serious about finding a solution, however, they’ll start looking elsewhere for progress on the issue. Like tobacco companies before them, tech companies are incapable of studying their products dispassionately and then regulating themselves for the common good. The ...

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• 13 January

  Wells Fargo can’t quite seem to fix its wagon

  

  Waiting for another sign that Wells Fargo & Co. has turned a corner? Its fourth-quarter earnings provided differing levels of validation for investors who had sent the stock flying to a record earlier this week. For the first time since the GOP tax bill was passed last month, Wells Fargo detailed its impact. The bank essentially confirmed expectations that the ...

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• 13 January

  In Oregon, progressivism spills over at the pump

  

  Frank Lloyd Wright purportedly said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Today, however, Oregon is the state with the strangest state of mind, which has something to do with it being impeccably progressive: In the series ‘Portlandia,’ the mention of artisanal lightbulbs might be satirical, but given today’s gas-pumping controversy, perhaps ...

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• 13 January

  Draghi unheeded as ECB minutes prompt new bets on 2018 hike

  

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank is again struggling to get the message across to markets that any unwinding of stimulus will be slow and steady. The euro soared, bonds slid and investors this week stepped up bets that interest rates will rise before the end of 2018, disregarding President Mario Draghi’s assurances that no such thing will happen until well ...

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• 13 January

  HSBC hires from Goldman, JPMorgan for Asia equities

  Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc made a slew of hires from rivals including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as the bank revamps its equities business in the Asia-Pacific region and expands a nascent majority-owned securities venture in China, people familiar with the matter said. Among the recent additions are Michael Parry, who joined from Goldman Sachs as a director focused on Asian ...

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