October, 2017

• 7 October

  US labour market strong despite hurricanes

  

  Bloomberg Two major hurricanes knocked down payrolls in September, yet the US labour market is holding up just fine. That’s the broad message from employment figures released by the Labor Department. Payrolls fell for the first time since 2010, reflecting Hurricane Harvey’s impact on Texas and Irma’s fallout in Florida. At the same time, the unemployment rate dropped to a ...

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• 7 October

  Trump ‘to restore’ fairness doctrine on TV

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump, who has pushed for broad rollbacks of regulations on the environment, markets, banking and other areas, mused on Twitter about restoring a media rule killed under a president he cites as one of his heroes, Ronald Reagan. “Late Night hosts are dealing with the Democrats for their very ‘unfunny’ & repetitive material, always anti-Trump! Should we ...

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• 7 October

  How subordinates can check an impulsive boss

  

  Consider what is, for the moment, an entirely hypothetical question: What might Secretary of Defense James Mattis do if he received an order from President Trump to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea in retaliation, say, for a hydrogen-bomb test that had gone awry? Certainly, Mattis could try to talk the president out of the attack, if he thought ...

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• 7 October

  Is Australia’s luck running out ?

  

  Australia’s record of 26 years without a recession flatters to deceive. The gaudy numbers mask serious flaws in the country’s economic model. First and most obviously, the Australian economy is still far too dependent on “houses and holes.” During part of the typical business cycle, national income and prosperity are driven by exports of commodities—primarily iron ore, liquefied natural gas ...

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• 7 October

  Facebook’s season of atonement is here

  Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg marked the occasion with a remarkably contrite post to his followers: “For those I hurt this year, I ask forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I ...

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• 7 October

  Senator endorses Intel on Russian meddling

  Leaving aside the bloviating protests of President Donald Trump, there are two ways to understand Russia’s influence campaign against the 2016 election. The first is obvious. The Russians tried to elect Trump. You don’t need access to top-secret US government documents to reach this conclusion. It happened in real time. Russians hacked the emails of leading Democrats and distributed them ...

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• 7 October

  In fact, Spain and Iraq are failing their secessionists

  

  The secession of a region without constitutional authority is a big deal, as referendums in Catalonia and Kurdistan have shown in the last week. To get a sense of the possible consequences, think of the US Civil War, which started precisely because Southern states insisted they could secede while Northern states pointed out that such a right was nowhere in ...

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• 7 October

  Why Trump’s Puerto Rico bailout was DOA

  

  Puerto Rico’s debt has been a major problem for years. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump supported a solution: We have to look at their whole debt structure…we’re going to have to wipe that out. 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. It only took ...

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• 7 October

  Brazil’s narrative of growing equality is oversold

  

  Not so long ago, Brazil seemed to be near a turning point. Latin America’s largest nation wasn’t just growing and generating jobs; it was finally poised, it seemed, to close one of the world’s most notorious gaps between rich and poor. Out went the old trope of “Belindia”—Brazil as a wealthy Belgium ringed by a vast and desperate India—and in ...

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• 7 October

  Google new phones tap software, to chase Apple

  

  Bloomberg Google introduced new versions of its Pixel smartphones that lack key hardware features of the latest devices from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. But the internet giant is trying to make up for that with tighter software and services integration. The upgraded phones were presented at a press conference in San Francisco. The Pixel 2 has a 5-inch ...

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