December, 2017

• 6 December

  Taxis can still grow amid competition from Uber, says Blue Bird

  Bloomberg PT Blue Bird Group, Indonesia’s largest taxi operator, said conventional modes of public transport such as taxis still have room to grow even with the increasing popularity of new ride-hailing applications. “People still need to have a safe, reliable and good value kind of public transport,” said President Director Noni Purnomo in Jakarta. “At the end of the day, ...

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• 6 December

  Unilever sees spurning of global brands spread beyond Asian market

  

  Bloomberg The tide is turning against multinational brands, which have been losing market share to local products not just in Asia’s emerging markets but also in the US and Europe, according to Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever NV. “Consumers are changing, not craving for global brands just for the sake of it,” said Hemant Bakshi, president director of Unilever Indonesia, ...

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• 6 December

  Trump’s economic revolution is, in fact, all about investment

  

  I’ve seen hundreds of articles on President Donald Trump and trade, but the real significance of the Trump economic revolution — for better or worse — is a focus on investment. There is no coordinating mastermind, but if you consider the intersection between what the Trumpian nationalists want and what a Republican Congress will deliver, it’s this: wanting to make ...

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• 6 December

  Investors are trying to learn things about companies

  

  “Insider trading is not about fairness,” I often say; “it’s about theft.” It’s not a crime to know things that other people do not know, and to trade on your knowledge. In fact it is good. In fact it is the point of securities markets, or a point of them anyway: Society wants capital to flow to good projects and ...

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• 6 December

  May has a 255-page cure for the British disease

  

  The UK has a productivity problem and its Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is out to solve it. At first glance, its new plan exemplifies the problem — a 255-page tome published on Monday is longer on blue-skies reflection than detailed policy. Still, government needs to be to held to account when it meddles in business, and the ...

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• 6 December

  Congress achieves the impossible on tax reform

  In their rush to pass something, anything, that they can call ‘tax reform,’ congressional Republicans have achieved the impossible: They have made an awful plan even worse. The first thing to note about the bill the Senate passed early Saturday is that it is not, by any reasonable definition of the term, tax reform. The elements of a smart reform ...

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• 6 December

  What central banks say about cryptocurrencies

  

  Eight years since the birth of bitcoin, central banks around the world are increasingly recognizing the potential upsides and downsides of digital currencies. The guardians of the global economy have two sets of issues to address. First is what to do, if anything, about emergence and growth of the private cryptocurrencies that are grabbing more and more attention — with ...

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• 6 December

  Who will fund clean energy? Familiar faces

  

  People who invest in the world’s energy systems often want to know how many trillions of dollars will be needed to finance renewable energy and natural gas. One way to find the answer is to look at what those who have already invested trillions of dollars want to happen as the world transitions to a lower-carbon power system and electrifies ...

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• 6 December

  Era of low volatility will unwind formulaically

  

  Sir John Templeton, the pioneer in global mutual funds, once said “the four most costly words in the annals of investing” are “this time is different.” That should resonate with monetary policy makers and institutional investors grappling with the causes, impacts and risks of the lowest market volatility, by far, in the era of modern finance. As this cycle of ...

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• 6 December

  India holds rates as inflation nears central bank’s target

  

  Bloomberg India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged as rebounding inflation limits room to spur an economy struggling to recover from disruptive government policies. The benchmark repurchase rate was left at 6 percent, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement in Mumbai on Wednesday. Five of the six-member monetary policy committee voted for the move, which was predicted ...

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