December, 2017

• 5 December

  Beware of an American economic boom

  

  We don’t need an economic boom, but that’s what we may be getting. Since the 2016 election, the stock market is up roughly 24 percent, reports Wilshire Associates. The price of the cybercurrency bitcoin soared more than 1,000 percent before retreating. The unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the lowest since 2000. The economy’s growth has exceeded 3 percent for ...

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• 5 December

  China’s hard-pressed home buyers aren’t sold on renting

  

  China has begun a great rental giveaway, offering cheap land and subsidized loans in an effort to kick-start development of home leasing markets in major cities across the nation. Anyone expecting a rental housing boom to match the growth of the private purchase market may be disappointed, though: China’s real estate industry is likely to remain dominated by the development ...

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• 5 December

  California is making dairy cows climate-friendly

  

  ‘California Regulates Cow Farts,’ is how a New York Post headline put it, implying it was a wacky move by Governor Jerry Brown. In fact, California’s methane law represents a serious attempt by America’s biggest dairy state to come to grips with a potent greenhouse gas. Methane is responsible for about a quarter of human-generated global warming. While it’s not ...

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• 5 December

  How not to erase student debt

  Even by government standards, it is a colossally dumb idea: revoking someone’s license to work as a way to get them to pay off their student loans. Yet many states do just that. Student loan debt has more than doubled since 2009 to $1.3 trillion today. The average borrower in the class of 2016 left campus more than $30,000 in ...

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• 5 December

  World’s most richly valued lender has an unhappy secret

  

  Bad things don’t happen to good banks. Or that’s the carefully crafted image projected by the world’s priciest lender. Assiduously shielding its loan book from the flying debris of India’s $207 billion bad-debt crisis, HDFC Bank Ltd. has kept its balance sheet in a near-pristine condition. The aura of invincibility bestowed by a 1.26 percent soured-loan ratio — compared with ...

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• 5 December

  Xiaomi raises more questions than cash

  

  Questions, questions, questions. If there’s one thing that’s tailed China’s Xiaomi Corp. for the past six years, it’s questions. The most recent come as a pair: Will the company IPO next year, and will it fetch the $50 billion it’s supposedly seeking? Last weekend, tech industry newsletter The Information reported that the maker of smartphones and other devices is eyeing ...

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• 5 December

  Artificial intelligence isn’t a game changer

  

  Not much time passes these days between so-called major advancements in artificial intelligence. Yet researchers are not much closer than they were decades ago to the big goal: actually replicating human intelligence. That’s the most surprising revelation by a team of eminent scholars who just released the first in what is meant to be a series of annual reports on ...

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• 5 December

  Deutsche asset management to pay bulk of profit in dividends

  

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG’s investment unit said it plans to pay out most of its earnings to shareholders as it seeks to attract investors to a planned initial public offering next year. The asset manager will use its DWS German retail brand to sell its products globally and will be renamed to reflect that brand, the bank said on Tuesday. ...

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• 5 December

  Weak global inflation assumption increases upside risk, says RBNZ

  

  Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s new assumption that global inflation will stay lower for longer means it is more exposed to the risk of prices picking up, Acting Governor Grant Spencer said. “More recently we have been assuming greater persistence in low global inflation and this is contributing to our current flat track for future OCR levels,” Spencer ...

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• 5 December

  Wall Street banks eye $600mn payday on CVS takeover of Aetna

  

  Bloomberg Wall Street banks including Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America could share in a fee bonanza of as much as $600 million, after pledging one of the biggest financing checks ever to help fund CVS’s $67.5 billion takeover of Aetna. The companies are set to shell out fees for M&A advisory, financing and also arranging a bond sale ...

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