April, 2017

• 25 April

  UK public finances show cracks as inflation pinches consumers

  

    Bloomberg Britain kept to its borrowing forecasts in a pre-election boost for Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond but cracks in the public finances are appearing as consumers feel the pain from inflation. The deficit narrowed to 52 billion pounds ($66.6 billion) in the fiscal year through March, in line with the 51.7 billion pounds forecast by budget officials ...

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• 25 April

  Novartis moves M&A search to early-stage drugs on price gain

    Bloomberg Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG said it will scout for medicines that are in earlier stages of development as acquisition price tags climb across the industry. “The price of some of these assets has increased to the point that we don’t feel like we can create value for Novartis shareholders,’’ Chief Executive Officer Joe Jimenez said on a conference ...

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• 25 April

  European investors flock back to buy UK property

    Bloomberg European investors who shunned London’s commercial property in the run-up to the Brexit referendum are flocking back as the weak pound cuts prices and electoral uncertainty on the continent makes the UK seem a good place for buyers to spread their bets. Investors from Europe plowed 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) into the capital’s offices, shops and warehouses ...

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• 25 April

  What France needs is Le Abenomics

  

    Voters in France’s presidential election are being asked to choose between supply-side economic reform, as offered by candidates like centrist Emmanuel Macron and center-right François Fillon, and demand-side reform, as promoted by the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon. The reality is that France needs both at the same time — one without the other won’t work. ...

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• 25 April

  Ambani’s Verizon clone has a goal worth bleeding for

  

    India’s most valuable business is earning money hand over fist from oil. Yet what’s exciting investors about Reliance Industries Ltd. are its telecoms losses. Those should go some way toward creating the Indian equivalent of Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. wireless carrier. Or at least that’s what the stock’s 38 percent jump this year in dollar terms is ...

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• 25 April

  Broken politics and a fragile world economy

    The global economy is gathering momentum, the International Monetary Fund has declared. That’s probably correct and undeniably encouraging, but there’s an ominous discord between this economic expansion and what’s euphemistically called “political uncertainty” — that is, the stresses caused by surging anti-trade, anti-market, anti-immigrant populism. This “uncertainty” could be the prelude to some seriously bad policies, enough to derail ...

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• 25 April

  Peace in Afghanistan remains elusive

    For centuries, Afghanistan has been a cauldron of chaos, conflict and anarchy. But the chaos has not been created or opted by Afghans. It has been engineered, exported to, and planted in the country. The foreign invasions in past decades, insurgency and civil war have totally destroyed Afghanistan, which has been haunted by great game between big powers jostling ...

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• 25 April

  Corporate China needs much better controls

  

    When it emerged last week that China Minsheng Banking Corp. had sold $436 million in suspect wealth-management products, fears rose of a collapse in the loosely regulated market for such products. It now looks like a more mundane case of forgery involving a branch manager. But that’s not exactly reassuring: In fact, it suggests a different kind of systemic ...

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• 25 April

  Amazon takes on Apple, Google as digital gatekeeper

  

    A recurring theme at Gadfly is Amazon.com Inc.’s ambitions to do everything under the sun. It looks as if the company now wants to become a quasi app store similar to Apple or Google’s mobile versions. Amazon has created a single spot for people to sign up to digital subscriptions from companies including the Los Angeles Times and digital ...

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• 25 April

  There is no easy fix for the German surplus

  

    Officials may not say so directly, but the US appears to consider Germany a currency manipulator. Germany’s large trade surplus, the accusation goes, comes at the expense of US companies. So, as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble traveled to Washington on Wednesday for an International Monetary Fund meeting, he brought along an eight-page primer on the German current account ...

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