August, 2017

• 28 August

  10 months after cash ban, India graft still endemic

  

  Bloomberg Nearly 10 months after India’s unprecedented ban on high value notes that was designed to tackle entrenched corruption, bribery continues to oil the wheels of business in Asia’s third-largest economy, according to a US risk management firm that advises foreign investors. Gifting of land, houses, luxury watches and sponsoring expensive travel abroad are now the preferred bribes as tax ...

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• 28 August

  World’s first diamond futures exchange starts trading in India

  Bloomberg The world’s first diamond futures exchange begins trading in India on Monday, enabling companies in the largest producer of the cut and polished gems to better hedge price risks. “Indian manufacturers most require this type of financial product,” said Sanjit Prasad, managing director of the Indian Commodity Exchange Ltd. India carries the price risk of holding huge inventories of ...

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• 28 August

  Trump’s Afghan plan poised to fail: Pakistan PM

  

  Bloomberg ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ US President Donald Trump’s strategy for the nation’s longest-running war in Afghanistan will meet the same fate as the plans of his predecessors, according to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. Failure. “From day one we have been saying very clearly the military strategy in Afghanistan has not worked and it will not work,” Abbasi, who took over ...

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• 28 August

  IS prepares to evacuate Syria-Lebanon border zone

  

  BEIRUT / Reuters The Syrian army and Hezbollah on Monday prepared to escort IS fighters to eastern Syria from their enclave on the border with Lebanon under an agreement following a week-long offensive against the extremist group. It will end any Sunni militant presence on the border, an important goal for Lebanon and the Shi’ite Hezbollah group, and is the ...

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• 28 August

  ‘Whereabouts of former Thai PM unknown’

  

  BANGKOK / Reuters Thailand’s defence minister on Monday said he did not know the whereabouts of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, days after she failed to show up for a verdict in her trial for negligence at which she faced up to 10 years in prison. Yingluck, whose government was ousted in a 2014 coup, fled via Singapore, sources in ...

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• 28 August

  Sweden opp leader resigns a year ahead of elections

  

  Bloomberg Anna Kinberg Batra stepped down as leader of Sweden’s biggest opposition party as the center-right bloc finds itself in disarray one year ahead of elections in the largest Nordic economy. Kinberg Batra resigned amid growing internal discontent over her stewardship and falling support in public opinion polls. Only 6 percent of all voters and a third of her party’s ...

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• 28 August

  Car bomb kills eight at Baghdad market

  BAGHDAD / Reuters A car bomb killed at least eight people in a crowded vegetable market in a Shi’ite Muslim district of Baghdad on Monday, police and medics said, in an attack claimed by IS. The car detonated in the eastern district of Jamila, police said, as Iraqi government forces were preparing to declare victory over the Sunni Muslim militants ...

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• 28 August

  This president can’t be the healer-in-chief

  

  President Bill Clinton went to Oklahoma City after a terrorist bombed the federal office building there in 1995. President George W. Bush lifted a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. President Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, South Carolina, at a funeral there for a victim of the 2015 shooting spree in ...

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• 28 August

  Laws that subvert the rule of law

  

  When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’ Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. He could not have imagined the modern proliferation and complexity of laws, or how subversive this is of the rule of ...

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• 28 August

  Markets are losing their patience for Trump’s antics

  I have been recommending a defensive stance in equities since at least February, and truth be told, that hasn’t worked out so well. The S&P 500 Index has returned 4.3 percent since then, including reinvested dividends. I’m not ready to throw in the towel. What compels me to keep at it is the behavior of stocks at the close of ...

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