July, 2016

• 20 July

  Traders eyeing cheap German stocks bet on carmakers’ revival

  

    Bloomberg Germany, one of Europe’s cheapest stock markets, is starting to see a resurgence in investor interest. Months of withdrawals from exchange-traded funds tracking German stocks are beginning to reverse amid a stabilizing euro and improving prospects for the country’s exporters. The biggest ETF following the shares just had three consecutive weeks of inflows for the first time since ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Morgan Stanley says year of the bull will push US yield to 1%

  

    Bloomberg Morgan Stanley’s Matthew Hornbach called this year’s Treasury market rally. Now he’s revising his forecasts and is more bullish than just about anyone else. Ten-year U.S. yields will fall more than 50 basis points, or 0.5 percentage point, to 1 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to Hornbach, the firm’s head of global interest-rate strategy in ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Oil halts slide near $45 as US crude stockpiles decline

  

    Bloomberg Oil held near $45 a barrel as U.S. industry data showed a drop in crude stockpiles, paring a surplus in the world’s largest fuel consumer. Futures were little changed in New York after dropping 1.3 percent Tuesday to a two-month low. Inventories declined by 2.3 million barrels last week, the American Petroleum Institute was said to report. While ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Anglo American cuts annual copper target after heavy snowfall in Chile

  

    Bloomberg Anglo American Plc, the second-best performer on the FTSE 100 Index this year, cut its annual target for copper output after heavy snow at operations in Chile. The shares slumped the most in more than three weeks. Production will be 570,000 to 600,000 metric tons this year, down from a forecast of as much as 630,000 tons, as ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Sempra shrinks buyback plan to free up cash for Mexico pipeline

  

    Bloomberg Sempra Energy says it’s more interested in making money from energy projects in Latin America than buying back shares. The San Diego, California-based utility owner said it’s scaling back its target for buying shares by $500 million and will instead use the cash to help build a $2 billion natural gas pipeline in Mexico. In fact, its Mexican ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Brazil’s Goldfajn confronts tough balancing act

  

    Bloomberg When Ilan Goldfajn presides over his first policy meeting as Brazil’s central bank chief, he’ll have a daunting task: reviving an economy mired in its worst recession in a more than a century while restoring the bank’s inflation-fighting bona fides. Traders and analysts — who expect the central bank to keep interest rates unchanged at a 10-year high ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  The only way to prevent lone wolf attacks

  

    Recent high-profile terror attacks pose a new challenge for police and intelligence services. All seem to be the work of lone wolf actors. Yet police and intelligence services, by the nature of their work, target groups. It’s possible to adjust that focus, but that would require Western societies to make an important trade-off. On Monday, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Not-so-young Netflix has a growth problem

  

    At some point, everyone knew, Netflix’s subscriber growth in the U.S. had to slow down. The company’s video-streaming service is nearing market saturation among its core demographic — affluent young-to-middle-aged people — meaning further gains will be harder to come by. Still, it was a bit of a shock for investors to learn from Monday’s earnings report that Netflix ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  Bad moods are the other global migration problem

    The unsettling reality of today’s world is that a bad mood can move readily from one country to another, even when events on the ground call for moderation or optimism. Or in the language of financial economics, emotional and ideological contagion is becoming a more important source of systemic risk. The spread of revolutions during the Arab Spring showed ...

  Read More »
• 20 July

  European banks may need $517bn of loss-absorbing funds

  

    Bloomberg European banks need to sell hundreds of billions of euros in loss-absorbing liabilities over the next few years to meet European Union rules designed to protect taxpayers from the cost of bank failures. The European Banking Authority estimates as much as 470 billion euros (US$517 billion) of financing is needed under the most conservative assumptions for what qualifies ...

  Read More »