June, 2017

• 18 June

  Ex-UBS compliance officer in court on $1.8mn insider case

  Bloomberg A former UBS Group AG compliance officer and a day trader charged by UK regulators with insider trading appeared in a London court for the first time to face allegations that they made 1.4 million pounds (1.8 million) illegally trading shares of Elizabeth Arden Inc. and four other companies. Fabiana Abdel-Malek, 34, and Walid Choucair, 38, were charged by ...

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• 18 June

  French luxury tycoon bullish on Macron reforms

  Bloomberg French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault is optimistic about the country’s new president, but he’s worried about the global economy. The chief executive officer of LVMH visited a technology fair in Paris where he mingled with startup founders and shook hands with 39-year-old President Emmanuel Macron, saying he is “very happy” with the new leader. Macron, who’s set to consolidate ...

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• 18 June

  France’s election marathon ends as Macron set for landslide win

  

  Bloomberg The French voted on Sunday for the fourth time in two months and the main outstanding question is just how big a majority they will hand President Emmanuel Macron. Polls from Harris and OpinionWay last week projected that Macron’s Republic on the Move movement, known as REM, may take up to 80 percent of the seats in the 577-member ...

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• 18 June

  Catastrophic forest fire leaves 57 dead in northern Portugal

  

  Bloomberg At least 57 people have been killed by a forest fire in northern Portugal, with many of the victims dying on the road as they tried to flee, authorities said. Thirty people were killed in their cars and 17 were found outside their vehicles by the side of the road near Pedrogao Grande, Secretary of State for Internal Administration ...

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• 18 June

  Trump not under probe for obstruction, lawyer tells NBC

  Bloomberg Donald Trump isn’t under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, a member of the president’s legal team said, despite Trump’s own comments on social media this week that he’s the target of a “witch hunt.” “The president is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction,” attorney Jay Sekulow said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. The ...

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• 18 June

  Trump’s NAFTA delusion

  

  The Trump administration is determined to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — which created a single market from Mexico’s southern border to the Yukon — but the main political appeal of this policy rests on a popular myth: that “fair” trade requires the United States to have a surplus or balanced trade with both Mexico and Canada. ...

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• 18 June

  India’s war of the mandarins leaves companies as victims

  

  First they conveniently lost their voice; then they miraculously got it back. But now that the pundits of India’s economic establishment are talking again, all investors hear is discord. The biggest casualty of the war of words between the finance ministry in New Delhi and the central bank in Mumbai is India Inc. Without clarity on where policymakers want the ...

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• 18 June

  The Federal Reserve’s new normal

  The Federal Reserve has prepared investors for a small increase in interest rates this week, part of its effort to get monetary policy back to normal. The central bank should deliver the quarter-point rise the markets expect — but that isn’t all it ought to do. Investors’ attention is turning to a new question: What does the Fed intend to ...

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• 18 June

  Media keeps missing political earthquakes

  Last week, as the shocking results of the British elections arrived, the most over-used sentence in Britain seemed to be: “I was wrong.” Another insurgent mass movement following Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star Movement in Italy had caused a political earthquake. In one of the biggest political upsets in ...

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• 18 June

  Short-termism hasn’t hurt companies long term

  

  Akio Morita, the legendary founder of Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp., once declared that “America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.” In an influential 1991 book called “The Japan That Can Say No,” Morita and his co-author, conservative politician Shintaro Ishihara, alleged that the short-term thinking of U.S. companies would be their downfall. Constrained by shareholders more obsessed ...

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