May, 2017

• 5 May

  Bulgarian PM seeks to defy past failures with new coalition

    Bloomberg Bulgaria’s parliament gave the go-ahead to Prime Minister Boyko Borissov to head his third government in eight years, though uncertainty remains as to whether his coalition with a loose alliance of nationalist parties will last to serve a full term. Lawmakers voted 133-101, without abstentions, to back the Gerb party’s cabinet with the United Patriots, Parliament Speaker Dimitar ...

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• 5 May

  A president who doesn’t know what it is to know

  

    It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that ...

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• 5 May

  How the robot apocalypse will actually go down

  

    There are two conflicting visions of where artificial intelligence will take humankind. Some people worry that when robots become capable of programming themselves, they’ll realize that humans are useless and do away with us. Others think that on the day when robots become sentient — that is, the moment of the singularity — humans will be one with the ...

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• 5 May

  Winters must unfreeze StanChart

    This summer, Bill Winters completes two years at Standard Chartered Plc, the emerging-markets lender whose share price is still 32 percent below where it was when the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive took over as CEO. While the bank’s drop in first-quarter impairment costs is making investors optimistic about asset quality, further upside will depend on Winters becoming ...

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• 5 May

  Syria safe zones plan a step in right direction

    Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be moving ahead for plan to establish safe zones in Syria backed by peacekeepers with a high degree conviction. And to achieve this, there is marked change in the interaction between major powers supporting rivals in the Syrian conflict. Putin secured the US backing for the proposal to create safe zones in Syria ...

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• 4 May

  China is repeating West’s mistakes in Pakistan

  

  When President Xi Jinping announced in 2015 that China would pump $46 billion worth of investments into Pakistan, the recipients of his largesse seemed less surprised than one might have expected. The military and political elites of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan have long extracted aid from outside powers in return for keeping a lid on things at home. As ...

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• 4 May

  Hang on, ICICI, the plumber’s coming

  

    The plumber who’ll sort out India’s bad-loan mess is about to get powerful new tools, and an overflowing toilet will soon be clean. Or that’s how investors are reacting to weaker-than-expected quarterly earnings from the country’s largest private-sector bank by assets. How sentiment changes. At the end of 2015, when concerns over Indian lenders’ balance sheets reigned supreme, ICICI ...

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• 4 May

  Why Netflix is winning the online piracy wars!

  

    A hacker who has unsuccessfully tried to hold Netflix for ransom has achieved an unexpected result: His failure shows that subscription-based business models in content distribution is making piracy pointless. Intellectual property owners’ slowness in adopting these models is the only reason content is still being pirated. Someone calling himself (or herself, or themselves) TheDarkOverlord stole most of the ...

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• 4 May

  Shell pumps a torrent of cash as takeover, cost cuts pay off

  

    Bloomberg Royal Dutch Shell Plc showed it has adapted to a world of lower oil prices, generating a surge in cash that allowed it to pay dividends while reducing debt. The Anglo-Dutch company’s first-quarter performance helps validate Chief Executive Officer Ben Van Beurden’s $54 billion purchase of BG Group Plc — for which some shareholders complained he overpaid — ...

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• 4 May

  Snow keeps natural gas prices down in Texas

  

    Bloomberg Natural gas in balmy Texas is feeling the chill of California’s snowy peaks 1,200 miles away. West Coast power producers are ditching gas in favor of cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power, which is surging after the wettest year ever across the Northern Sierra Nevada range. Much of that moisture fell as snow which is now melting, soaking fields, filling ...

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