August, 2017

• 20 August

  UK second-home ownership jumps

  

  Bloomberg One in 10 adults in the UK owns multiple houses, underscoring a growing generational divide in the nation’s property market. While overall home ownership has dropped this century as prices skyrocketed, the number of people with at least two properties has jumped 30 percent to 5.2 million between 2000-02 and 2012-14, the Resolution Foundation said. The vast majority of ...

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• 20 August

  Nestle’s Poland Spring is groundwater, alleges new suit

  

  Bloomberg Nestle SA’s Poland Spring Water unit has duped American consumers into paying premium prices for ordinary groundwater that’s pumped from some of Maine’s most populated areas, rather than from natural springs as the company advertises, according to a lawsuit. While Poland Springs says its water bottles contain “100 percent natural spring water” from a source deep in Maine’s woods, ...

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• 20 August

  The new Mercedes Maybach concept, a 20-foot-long convertible

  

  Bloomberg At a private estate on Pebble Beach Golf Course in Carmel, Calif., Mercedes-Benz unveiled its latest concept car: the Mercedes-Maybach Vision 6 Cabriolet last week. Like the Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6 concept that the company unveiled prior to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance last year, the Maybach 6 Cabriolet is an electric car that’s nearly 20 feet long, has a ...

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• 20 August

  The US missed its chance to make China play fair

  

  Generals, the old saying goes, always fight the last war. A similar (though less pithy) principle is that politicians always propose solutions to the last decade’s problems. In the US, there are two main areas where we see this principle at work. The first is immigration—net illegal immigration stopped a decade ago, but President Donald Trump and his supporters are ...

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• 20 August

  Did you hear that?: Google moves into ‘thought control’ business

  

  Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite!”— not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially ...

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• 20 August

  Households won’t trip up the bull market

  Facts are facts, but their interpretation is often subject to preconceived notions that can be easily misunderstood. Households have been net sellers of stocks for some time, which is a fact. The interpretation of this fact, however, can go badly awry. The dangerous implicit assumption is that households are selling because they want to reduce their exposure to equities. That ...

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• 20 August

  Standing up to Trump is good for business

  Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier deserves congratulations for resigning from a White House business council to protest President Donald Trump’s shameful response to last weekend’s white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. So do two other CEOs who followed his example. More corporate leaders should do the same. It’s in their interest to do so. Corporate leaders lend credibility to a ...

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• 20 August

  Actually, US needs China trade deals, not ‘remedies’

  

  China is the largest market for General Motors, but there is no GM China. Instead, there is SAIC-GM, a joint venture between China’s largest state-owned auto company and GM.All auto companies operating in China have a similar partner, such as SAIC-Volkswagen, GAC-Toyota and Changan-Ford. And the partners are typically state-owned companies, and their names come first. Doing business in China ...

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• 20 August

  China’s ballooning debt unnerves IMF

  

  China’s budget and trade scolds should pause for reflection. Debt racked up by China’s government, companies and households will likely balloon to almost 300 percent of gross domestic product by early next decade, the International Monetary Fund projected in its annual review of the country’s economy. Big, for sure, and a risk to global financial stability. But anything less would ...

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• 20 August

  Red-hot tech stocks lose some big supporters

  

  The rally this year in US stocks has been defined by its lack of breadth. Put another way, without the eye-popping returns of a few high-flying technology stocks, the performance of the market would look very different—and not in a good way. So it’s more than a bit concerning when the so-called smart money starts to pull away from this ...

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