September, 2016

• 13 September

  Pyongyang’s ‘grave threat’ may be next US prez’s first big test

  

    North Korea’s latest nuclear test triggered diplomatic aftershocks in Asia — and a growing concern that the volatile regime in Pyongyang may pose the first big test for the next U.S. president. Last Friday’s test was the fifth and largest nuclear device North Korea has detonated, estimated at 10 kilotons, and it came defiantly on the 68th anniversary of ...

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• 13 September

  Globalization of the world economy hits a wall

  

    For the first time since early 2014, the dollar value of goods imported and exported by the G-20 countries actually grew a little in the second quarter of this year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported last week. This is probably just because oil prices bounced back a bit after hitting a 12-year low in the first ...

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• 13 September

  Smart immigration policy for a post-Brexit Britain

    A key demand of Brexit voters was to take back control of the U.K.’s immigration policy. Prime Minister Theresa May has promised she will —but hasn’t said what she’ll do with this control once she has it. Many Brexit supporters are hoping for a severely restrictive system. This would be a mistake, and May ought to say so. Liberal ...

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• 13 September

  Free zones can enhance strength of SMEs

    An allocation of AED5 billion in contracts to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) announced by Dubai Expo 2020 manifests the importance that the UAE gives to the sector. The recent federal bankruptcy law is also aimed at boosting investment by SMEs to vitalize the country’s business landscape. Today, the segment is contributing 60% to the GDP of the UAE ...

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• 13 September

  What Clinton could learn from Boris Yeltsin

  

    The failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to disclose that she has come down with pneumonia amplifies the parallels between this U.S. presidential election campaign and the 1996 contest that opposed the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. The two presidential races are similar in their negative framing. In Russia 20 years ago and in ...

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• 13 September

  Bond markets hit a new ‘Ukrainian Chicken Moment’

    Two European companies — French drugmaker Sanofi and German household products maker Henkel — last week became the first firms to persuade investors to pay them to borrow euros. By selling bonds yielding minus 0.05 of a percentage point, they may well have signaled the bond market’s peak, delivering this decade’s equivalent of the “Ukrainian Chicken Farm Moment.” That ...

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• 13 September

  Don’t assume robots will be our future co-workers

  

    Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is “Will the robots take our jobs?” This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call “skill-biased technological change” — people who are technically ...

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• 13 September

  Bitcoin tech harnessed to push electricity revamp

  

    Bloomberg Bitcoin technology is starting to seep into the electricity business, shaking up the way payments are managed every time a light switch is flipped. From New York to Vienna, researchers and utilities are adapting the cloud-based ledger system used to track bitcoins as a replacement for slower administrative systems that require constant human input and multiple spreadsheets. Once ...

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• 13 September

  HP Inc. to buy Samsung’s printer biz for $1.05 billion

  

    Bloomberg HP Inc. sees its future in copiers and printers. The personal-computer maker has agreed to buy Samsung Electronics Co.’s printer business for $1.05 billion, betting that it can grab share and generate income, even in a shrinking global market. The deal will add to earnings in the first full year, Palo Alto, California-based HP said in a statement ...

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• 13 September

  Apple’s new iOS 10 rich in new features

    Relaxnews Apple release iOS 10, the latest version of its mobile operating system. The software update for users of the firm’s current compatible devices lands a few days ahead of the official release of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. This latest update is one of the richest in new features in the history of iOS. Notable additions include ...

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