May, 2017

• 22 May

  London home sellers shrug off election, raise asking prices

  

  Bloomberg London house prices rebounded in May, rising to a record as buyers and sellers defied the usual trend of holding off on property transactions before an election. The average asking price in the city rose 2.1 percent from April to 649,864 pounds ($846,000), property website Rightmove Plc said on Monday, even with the upcoming UK general election on June ...

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• 22 May

  Clariant to buy Huntsman for $6.4bn as M&A surges

  Bloomberg Clariant AG agreed to buy Huntsman Corp. in an all-stock deal valuing the US company at about $6.4 billion, extending a record run in transactions in the global chemicals industry. Huntsman holders will get 1.2196 shares in the new company, to be called HuntsmanClariant, for each share they own, with Clariant emerging with a 52 percent stake, the two ...

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• 22 May

  UK gas plunges as cargoes sail to oversupplied Europe

  Bloomberg Cargoes from around the world filled with liquefied natural gas are sailing to Europe just when the region doesn’t really need them. Same-day gas in the UK fell the most since October as forecasts for the week showed summer is arriving early, weakening demand for the heating fuel. That comes just as LNG vessels that set sail for Europe ...

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• 22 May

  EU finalizes Brexit position as UK threatens to quit talks

  

  Bloomberg European Union ministers finalized their Brexit negotiating position a day after the UK threatened to quit talks on its departure unless the bloc drops its demands for a divorce payment as high as 100 billion euros ($112 billion). Governments of 27 remaining nations approved their mandate for EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier at a two-hour meeting in Brussels. The ...

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• 22 May

  China may find its new empire too hard to handle

  

  To Indian eyes, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s big One Belt One Road Belt (OROB) Forum — which attracted 29 heads of government and representatives of 130 countries — looked awfully familiar. It looked, in fact, like an imperial durbar — the sort of grand spectacle that the British in India used to arrange periodically, with princelings from across the subcontinent ...

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• 22 May

  Economic forecasting is still broken

  

  Economists still get a lot of flak for failing to predict the 2007-2009 recession. These criticisms are often misguided. Nonetheless, there’s an important sense in which forecasting models were badly mistaken — and probably remain so today. Critics of forecasting tend to misunderstand its purpose. Forecasters know perfectly well that, in a random world, the one certainty is that their ...

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• 22 May

  Federal power spins its ever-growing web

  

  A blind spider creeping through America’s judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two central Texas counties, is any of the federal government’s business. If it is, what isn’t? The US Fish and Wildlife Service ...

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• 22 May

  Egypt hit by surprise rate hike, Qatar outperforms in quiet Gulf

  

  Reuters Egypt’s stock market tumbled in heavy trade on Monday after the central bank unexpectedly raised key interest rates overnight, while Qatar outperformed in an otherwise quiet Gulf. Cairo’s blue-chip index dropped 2.5 percent after the central bank hiked its overnight deposit rate and overnight lending rate by two percentage points — its first increase since a hike of three ...

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• 22 May

  US stocks rise as oil advances, dollar weakens

  

  Bloomberg US stocks advanced for a third day as crude pushed above $50 a barrel before OPEC meets this week. The euro advanced after Angela Merkel said the “too weak” currency shared the blame for Germany’s trade surplus. The S&P 500 Index’s three-day climb topped 1 percent following its biggest selloff of the year as investors focused on corporate deals. ...

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• 22 May

  China, Russia aim to deliver big jets by 2027 to take on Boeing

  

  Bloomberg China and Russia teamed up to develop twin-aisle jets that will compete with Airbus SE and Boeing Co., the planemakers who dominate passenger aircraft capable of trans-continental flights. State-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China Ltd. and Russia’s United Aircraft Corp. aim to hand over the plane to customers by 2025-2027, UAC Chairman Yury Slyusar said at a briefing in ...

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