January, 2018

• 6 January

  Spotify tempts investors with report of 70mn subscribers

  

  Bloomberg Investors are finally getting a crack at the resurgent music business. Spotify, owner of the world’s largest paid music service, plans to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange this quarter, passing up a traditional public offering for what’s called a direct listing. The debut will test whether investors are ready to buy into the music industry, which ...

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• 6 January

  Will the economy save the American president?

  

  For President Trump, a lot is riding on the economy in 2018. If it continues to do well, it should bolster his popularity and his claim that he understands it better than his critics. But if it slows or drops into a recession, it would weaken that claim — perhaps his strongest selling point. So, what’s the economic prognosis? First, ...

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• 6 January

  Boeing’s Embraer bid isn’t highflying

  

  Boeing Co.’s purported bid for Embraer SA looks low. Boeing has been aggressively pursuing a takeover of the Brazilian regional jet maker, a remarkable shift for a company that dubbed a similar combination struck by Airbus SE and Bombardier Inc. in October ‘a questionable deal’ that wouldn’t force it to change its strategic path. Many details are still being sorted, ...

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• 6 January

  The millennium is off to a bad start

  

  In the first 18 years of the new millennium, the US economy has fared much worse than it could have. If the Federal Reserve wants to improve that performance, it should consider changing the way it manages growth and inflation. Employment among people in their prime working years (ages 25 to 54) has yet to recover to where it was ...

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• 6 January

  Europe can’t afford a leaderless Germany

  More than three months after its federal election, Germany still has no new government. Oddly enough, this may be less of a problem for Germany, which continues to enjoy a strong economic run, than it is for the European Union. The euro zone needs reform, and that won’t happen without German leadership. Angela Merkel promised in a speech on New ...

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• 6 January

  Big data works only for those who hype it

  

  Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner challenging tech giants on several fronts, has opened another: “big data.” In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she singles out data as an important competitive advantage that should be more seriously considered in antitrust reviews and investigations. Buying the mostly groundless big data hype is, unfortunately, often the flip side of ...

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• 6 January

  Bitcoin’s cheap energy feast won’t last longer

  

  To understand why China is cracking down on power use by bitcoin miners, have a look at curtailment. The practice—where producers of wind and solar power cease generation because the entire electricity system is oversupplied—has been a major problem for the country in recent years. In the northwestern provinces of Xinjiang and Gansu, as much as one-third of wind generation ...

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• 6 January

  A new commodity boom doesn’t mean ecological doom

  

  Demand is surging again for oil, minerals and grains — the basic goods to which Latin America’s fortunes have long been tethered. After a year of graft scandals and political whiplash, you can just about hear the sighs of collective relief. Or is that just a giant sucking sound? Since the voyages of discovery, raw materials and farm goods have ...

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• 6 January

  Euro-area inflation slowdown undermines calls to end QE

  

  Bloomberg European Central Bank policy makers who marked the turn of the year by pushing for an end to crisis-era stimulus measures just got a reminder that they’ll have to wait a while longer for price pressures to pick up. Despite solid economic growth, euro-area inflation slowed to 1.4 percent last month from 1.5 percent, and the underlying rate unexpectedly ...

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• 6 January

  Canadian banks expect drop in unemployment to raise interest rates

  

  Bloomberg All but one of Canada’s six biggest commercial lenders now say the central bank will raise interest rates this month after the jobless rate dropped to its lowest in modern records. Toronto-Dominion Bank, Ba-nk of Nova Scotia, Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce changed their forecasts after a Statistics Canada report showed the unemployment ...

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