January, 2018

• 3 January

  Jack Ma needs to prove he’s really serious about coming to America

  

  I guess a handshake with POTUS-to-be wasn’t a help after all. A year after Chinese billionaire Jack Ma met US President-elect Donald Trump, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has finally given up on his bid to buy MoneyGram International Inc. for $18 per share. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US dragged its feet on giving the ...

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• 3 January

  China’s rail rejuvenation story awaits a happy ending

  

  Five years after two high-speed trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, China’s railway companies are making a comeback. It’s not easy to find value after a 51 percent rally in the MSCI China Index during 2017. So lately, sell-side banks have been telling their clients a rail renaissance story. CRRC Corp., the world’s largest maker of equipment for ...

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• 3 January

  Social media is terrible, but it doesn’t have to be

  For the social-media business, this New Year is one of grim tidings. Every day, it seems, pioneers in the field are offering mea culpas — airing regrets, expressing caution, apologizing for a technology that seems to have run amok. One former Facebook Inc. executive recently conceded that the network is “ripping apart the social fabric.” A former engineer has warned ...

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• 3 January

  Solar’s bright future is further away than it seems

  

  There is now a doctrine of what I call “solar triumphalism”: the price of panels has been falling exponentially, the technology makes good practical sense, and only a few further nudges are needed for solar to become a major energy source. Unfortunately, this view seems to be wrong. Solar energy could be a boon to mankind and the environment, but ...

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• 3 January

  A retailers’ guide to curb online returns

  

  Santa Claus has left us long time back with a sleigh load of sweaters, toys and electronics — some of which we didn’t ask for, don’t want or can’t use. And so now, as legions of people say “no thanks” to some of the gifts they unwrapped on Christmas morning, about $90 billion of those holiday goodies are going back ...

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• 3 January

  Chinese populism lives in a video-sharing app

  

  Yang Yang, a 22-year-old Chinese corn farmer, spends two to three hours per day streaming video of life in his cliffside village to smartphones across China. He spends lots of time clinging to a cliffside ladder, one hand on his selfie stick, while he banters with fans about village life. It’s hardly riveting television, but in China it has an ...

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• 3 January

  All change at top of ECB as Draghi era approaches end

  

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank is heading for a two-year leadership overhaul that peaks with the selection of a successor to President Mario Draghi, and it will be politics as much as ability that determines who get the jobs. Five of the ECB’s seven top posts will be vacated by the end of 2019, starting with Vice President Vitor Constancio ...

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• 3 January

  All talk, few answers from FOMC for Yellen’s long inflation miss

  

  Bloomberg Janet Yellen’s Federal Reserve probably didn’t make much progress last month toward resolving the biggest topic of debate during her tenure leading the central bank: low inflation. Minutes of the US central bank’s December 12-13 policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee gathering will probably show the outlook for consumer prices continued to dominate the discus- sion when they are published ...

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• 3 January

  China’s small banks dumped on signs of more policy pain

  

  Bloomberg China’s smaller banks started the New Year with a double whammy from regulators and investors, and more pain may be looming. Bank of Tianjin Co. tumbled by as much as 12 percent in the first two trading days, the biggest two-day decline since its Hong Kong listing in March 2016, after rallying at the end of last year. Bank ...

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• 3 January

  PBOC poised to raise money market rates 3 times this year

  

  Bloomberg China’s central bank will make modest increases in money-market rates in 2018 as it aims to keep up the pressure on deleveraging and prevent too much divergence with US policy, according to a Bloomberg survey. The People’s Bank of China is seen raising interest rates on reverse-repurchase agreements by five basis points three times this year, starting in the ...

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