February, 2017

• 16 February

  Alphabet taps McCray to lead access unit, including fiber

  

    Bloomberg Alphabet Inc. named broadband executive Gregory McCray to lead its Access subsidiary as the company tries to develop a new strategy for the internet-communications business. With the appointment, the Access unit, which includes the high-speed Fiber internet service, is getting slimmer. Several hundred employees are moving over to Alphabet’s main Google business, according to a person familiar with ...

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• 16 February

  Serbia needs to stop financing ailing state companies: IMF

    Bloomberg Serbia needs to stop subsidizing unprofitable state companies to lock in progress the largest former Yugoslav republic has made in cutting the budget, staunching one of the largest drains on state coffers, the local head of the International Monetary Fund said. “Fiscal costs from loss-making state-owned enterprises need to be plugged,” said Sebastian Sosa in an Belgrade interview ...

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• 16 February

  Monopolies are worse than we thought

  

    Economists are increasingly turning their attention to the problem of monopoly. This doesn’t mean literal monopoly, like when one utility company provides all the power in a city. It refers to market concentration in general — when an industry goes from having 20 players to having only 10, or when the four biggest companies in an industry start taking ...

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• 16 February

  Buffett didn’t get a bargain on his latest Apple shares

  

    Part of Warren Buffett’s mystique is his fondness for a good value. He still lives in an Omaha house he bought in the 1950s. Buffett’s license plate at one point read “Thrifty.” When it comes to Apple Inc., however, Buffett’s firm isn’t exactly plucking from the bargain bin. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. first disclosed a $1 billion stake in Apple ...

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• 16 February

  Stop dithering over Greece

    Is Europe heading back to financial mayhem? Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras warned this week that it might be. Any further delay in reaching agreement between Greece and its creditors, he said, risked a new recession and a fresh crisis of confidence across the euro zone. Maybe that’s a little alarmist — but he’s right about one thing. ...

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• 16 February

  Two-state solution only option for Mideast peace

    US President Donald Trump on Wednesday did about-face on Palestine-Israel conflict. He abandoned the US policy on ‘two-state’ solution for Middle East peace. Trump, during a joint White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held back from clearly supporting an independent Palestinian state. Trump said he would be open to a Mideast peace agreement that doesn’t ...

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• 16 February

  Why some consumer costs just grow and grow

  

    Why does everything cost so darn much? More to the point, why does it cost so much more than it used to? Well, not everything costs more than it used to. Food is cheap. Electronics are absurdly cheap: I can get a clock radio on Amazon today for not much more than I would have paid in 1965 (before ...

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• 16 February

  Musk’s next frontier is underground

  

    Elon Musk wants to dig tunnels. Without them, he says, “we will all be in traffic hell forever.” It’s a well-timed ambition, given President Trump’s plan to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure projects. Let’s hope he can figure out what he’s doing. Musk has already started burrowing near the offices of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Los Angeles — ...

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• 16 February

  Coming to US no done deal for China’s film wannabes

    Chinese companies looking to escape slower economic growth at home have turned, quite naturally, to soccer and Hollywood. They should prepare for some unhappy endings. Recon Group, the Chinese firm that bought the UK’s Aston Villa Football Club, is the latest to attempt to add movie making to its bow, in talks to acquire Millennium Films, according to people ...

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• 16 February

  Lenovo comes up short on smartphones

  

    Bloomberg Lenovo Group Ltd.’s mobile-phone business continues to shrink, while its personal-computer division managed anaemic growth in the face of brutal holiday-season competition. The world’s largest PC maker’s profit plummeted more than two thirds in the December quarter, missing analysts’ projections after HP Inc. threatened its position in North America. Smartphone sales declined almost a quarter globally as Lenovo ...

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