October, 2017

• 9 October

  Accor hotel offers $930mn for Mantra

  

  Bloomberg Accor SA, Europe’s biggest hotel operator, offered to buy Australia’s Mantra Group Ltd. in a deal valuing the hotel and resort company at $930 million. The French company offered A$3.96 per share in cash for Mantra and was given access to its books, the target said in a statement on Monday. Mantra shares jumped by a record 18 percent ...

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• 9 October

  Donald Trump pours millions into money-losing Scottish golf course

  

  Bloomberg From the 300-plus crystal chandeliers to the gold-plated taps in the bathrooms, Donald Trump has transformed a hotel overlooking one of the world’s most legendary golf courses into an eponymous glittering palace. Members gathering for their tee times say they love many of the changes at the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, but they doubt the president will ever ...

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• 9 October

  Telkom suspends work with KPMG S Africa pending probe

  

  Bloomberg Telkom SA SOC Ltd., South Africa’s largest landline operator, won’t award any new business to KPMG LLP’s local unit pending the outcome of an investigation into the firm by the country’s accountancy body. Any contracts underway with the auditor and consulting firm will be completed and their expiration dates will stand, the Pretoria-based company said in an email to ...

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• 9 October

  Economic cannibalism

  

  The “spoils society” is a phrase I coined some years ago to illustrate a basic problem of wealthy societies, including, of course, the United States. After all, our annual GDP (gross domestic product) is approaching $20 trillion. The problem is that, as societies become richer, so does the temptation for people to advance their economic interests by grabbing someone else’s ...

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• 9 October

  Whoever controls the operating system will direct the future

  

  My thoughts tend to go to dark places these days. And so when I watched Google on Wednesday trot out one after another of its homegrown computing devices for every task and every nook of our homes, I went straight to dystopia: R.I.P. digital competition. Today most people experience computing through devices controlled by a handful of companies: principally Microsoft ...

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• 9 October

  Fed officials reveal their true inflation attitudes

  Central bankers are increasingly concerned about the possibility of low inflation expectations. But will those worries have an impact on the Federal Reserve’s December meeting? With the bank seemingly on autopilot for the rest of 2017, odds still favor a rate hike, yet if fears of falling inflation expectations gain more traction, look for policy makers to start downgrading rate-increase ...

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• 9 October

  A small, right advance in the debate over guns

  The National Rifle Association has finally found a device it will not unequivocally defend. The bump stock, which essentially turns a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun and helped Stephen Paddock turn Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas into the deadliest in modern US history, should be subject to “additional regulations,” the group said on Thursday. If congratulations are not ...

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• 9 October

  The Russia collusion you should care about

  

  Forget Twitter trolls, Facebook ads and multilingual propaganda websites: The biggest Russian threat to Western democracies comes from the massive amounts of cash Russians have exported and parked in the West. That money’s corrupting potential is all but limitless, but both the increasingly isolationist Russia and the increasingly anti-Russian West do little to stem the flow. In a recent paper, ...

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• 9 October

  Boards behaving badly are now on notice in India

  

  India’s company boards are due for another shakeup, and this time around investors should see some real change. The reason to place a higher burden of expectation on the Uday Kotak committee, which submitted its report to the stock-market regulator, is that it’s at least attempting to break away from a 20-year tradition of trying to fashion a modern corporate ...

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• 9 October

  Puerto Rico faces not just debt, but depopulation

  

  “They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Donald Trump told Geraldo Rivera. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be—you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.” Bond markets didn’t appreciate the ...

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