May, 2017

• 14 May

  Extent of bad loans at Italian banks overestimated: Padoan

  Bloomberg The numbers circulating about bad loans at Italian banks are too high, Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said. “The numbers that have been floating around” amount to several hundred billion euros — this “grossly overestimates the impact, I would say that now we are talking about tens of billions,” Padoan said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Bari, Italy, ...

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• 14 May

  Singapore banks’ wealth investments finally pay off

  

  Bloomberg Singapore’s big three banks have invested heavily in their wealth-management businesses over the past year and the results are starting to show. Higher income from servicing Asia’s more well-heeled individuals helped DBS Group Holdings Ltd., Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. (OCBC) and United Overseas Bank Ltd. (UOB)offset bad-loan provisions and weaker loan margins to post better-than-expected first-quarter profits. OCBC’s wealth-management revenue ...

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• 14 May

  North Korea fires missile in test for South Korean president

  

  Bloomberg North Korea fired a ballistic missile early Sunday, its seventh such test this year, just days after South Korea elected a president who vowed to engage with Kim Jong Un’s regime to defuse tensions over its nuclear weapons program. The missile was launched at 5:27 a.m from the city of Kusong, northwest of the capital Pyongyang, and flew about ...

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• 14 May

  Russian election meddling well documented: Tillerson

  Bloomberg Russian interference in the 2016 US election has been “well documented,” but it’s still in the interests of the US to attempt to improve relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said. “I don’t think there’s any question that the Russians were playing around in our electoral processes,” Tillerson said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press ...

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• 14 May

  Macron takes charge of divided France as youngest president

  Bloomberg Emmanuel Macron became the youngest president of France on Sunday, leading a country where economic malaise and security concerns drove extremist parties to their highest-ever scores in this year’s election. Macron is the eighth directly elected president of the Fifth Republic, after assuming the role in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris. “For decades France has doubted ...

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• 14 May

  Globalization’s false sins

  

  Globalization has gotten a bad rap. The Trump White House associates it with all manner of economic evil, especially job loss. The administration has made undoing the damage a central part of its economic strategy. This will almost certainly fail and disappoint, because globalization’s ill-effects have been wildly exaggerated. A new report shows why. It comes from the Peterson Institute ...

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• 14 May

  Is China really, finally deleveraging?

  

  There’s growing evidence that China is finally scaling back its epic borrowing binge. That’s important for a lot of reasons, not least for reducing risk and avoiding a financial crisis. The question is whether the government can sustain the pain. Regulators in Beijing are well aware of the risks that excessive leverage poses, and have tried many times over the ...

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• 14 May

  Please stop talking about Russia, Mr President

  Since President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, the White House has offered an evolving series of rationales for the decision. Trump himself offered a new one on Thursday — several, actually — but he didn’t exactly clarify things. In an interview with NBC News, after making the implausible claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ...

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• 14 May

  Electronics ban disparity must be addressed

  The US banned in March laptop and tablets in cabin baggage on flights originating from eight countries, impacting global hubs including Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Istanbul. It applied also to any electronics devices larger than smartphones. The action affected major carriers such as Emirates, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines. The measure includes 10 international airports in seven Middle Eastern countries ...

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• 14 May

  China has world’s biggest productivity problem

  

  Just about everybody assumes that China will overtake the US as the world’s indispensable economy. One factor, however, could slow its seemingly relentless march and cast doubt on China’s prospects for becoming an advanced economy: faltering productivity. Sure, China is advancing daily in wealth, technology and expertise. But nothing is inevitable in economics. As costs rise and the labor force ...

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