November, 2017

• 26 November

  China’s Communist party needs to save bike sharing

  

  During its first six months of existence, Bluegogo, China’s third-largest bike-sharing firm, dumped 600,000 bicycles into Chinese cities. Twenty million people signed up to use them; investors showered the company with $58 million in funds. But with rental rates as low as $0.07 per half-hour, Bluegogo’s days were numbered and last week the company folded. In an apologetic letter, its ...

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• 26 November

  Black Friday may be getting stronger

  Now that we’ve all eaten plenty of turkey and fallen asleep on the couch watching football, it’s time for yet another Thanksgiving weekend tradition: declaring Black Friday dead. This has been a common theme in analysis and media reports about retail’s annual deal extravaganza for years now. As online shopping grows, there’s less incentive to wait outside in the cold ...

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• 26 November

  Ending net neutrality isn’t the end of the world

  

  Eliminating net neutrality is, in the best and worst case scenarios, either necessary to keep the internet up and running, or will lead to a dystopian future where a few major corporations control our thoughts. The more prosaic reality, however, is that a world without net neutrality will work just fine. I am therefore not incensed (or very excited) about ...

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• 26 November

  Bond traders start to see crack in Fed’s resolve about inflation

  

  Bloomberg Traders are about to find out just how worried Federal Reserve officials are about the outlook for inflation. The depth of that angst has ramifications for the US bond market’s dominant trend: the flattening yield curve. Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the nominee to succeed her, Jerome Powell, lead a busy lineup of central bankers speaking this week. They ...

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• 26 November

  Amazon’s Bezos fortune hits $100bn on ‘Black Friday’

  Bloomberg Jeff Bezos is the world’s newest $100 billion mogul. The Amazon.com Inc. founder’s fortune is up $2.4 billion to $100.3 billion, as the online retailer’s shares jumped more than 2 percent on optimism for Black Friday sales. Online purchases for the day are up 18.4 percent over last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and investors are betting ...

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• 26 November

  Egypt’s stock traders remain unfazed

  Bloomberg Holders of Egyptian stocks seem to have developed thick skin. The benchmark index rose 0.8 percent in Cairo on Sunday even after more than 300 people were killed in a militant attack in northern Sinai on Friday. “No one is in shock as investors have, unfortunately, become immune to such events,” said Ashraf Akhnoukh, the director of Middle East ...

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• 26 November

  Brexit spurs European banks to trim exposure to UK assets

  

  Bloomberg European banks pared their exposure to Britain in the aftermath of its vote to quit the European Union, slashing their UK assets by $425 billion in the span of a year. The decline was driven by a 35 percent drop in derivatives exposures, showing European banks are preparing for the risk that the UK fails to reach an agreement ...

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• 26 November

  Pimco, BlueBay score political win by buying Catalonia bonds

  

  Bloomberg For proof that taking on political risk is a winning formula in Europe this year, look no further than Pimco’s wager on Spanish unity. The California fund manager has amassed the largest position of Catalonia’s $6 billion of junk-rated debt, undeterred by a raucous independence movement and a snap election next month that may produce another victory for separatist ...

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• 26 November

  Iraq’s TBI opens office in Abu Dhabi

  

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI) has opened a representative office in Abu Dhabi, making it the only Iraqi Trade Finance bank to have a presence in the UAE. The wholly government owned bank, which holds 80% market share in Iraq, has established its first international office at Abu Dhabi Global Market on Al Maryah Island. ...

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• 26 November

  ‘Investment bankers are hard to replace with bots’

  Bloomberg Not all bankers need to fear the march of the robots. Nordea Bank AB, which last month said it will need to cut 6,000 jobs as part of a process to become a more digital firm, is now offering some insight into who’s likely to be hardest hit. Ewan MacLeod, Nordea’s chief digital officer, says customers should expect to ...

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