Bloomberg When Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc delivered positive earnings few saw coming last quarter, China’s top electric carmakers were weathering a historical contraction in demand. Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co, the country’s biggest maker of new energy vehicles — all-electric, fuel-cell and plugin hybrid cars — just reported an 89% slump in third-quarter earnings and warned profit could fall as much ...
Read More »Honda, Hitachi to form $17bn car parts maker in merger
Bloomberg Honda Motor Co and Hitachi Ltd agreed to merge four of their car parts businesses to create a components supplier with almost $17 billion in sales, joining a wave of partnerships sweeping the global auto industry. Honda, Japan’s second-biggest carmaker, and Hitachi, one of the country’s biggest industrial conglomerates, said they will combine Hitachi Automotive Systems and Honda affiliates ...
Read More »Soho China considers $8b office tower sales
Bloomberg Soho China Ltd is considering selling a majority of its commercial property holdings in deals that may fetch as much as $8 billion, people familiar with the matter said, sending the shares up the most on record. At least eight office towers in Beijing and Shanghai are being discussed as part of the planned sales, the people said, asking ...
Read More »The inflation mystery
The virtual elimination of inflation is one of the great uncovered stories of our time. If you go back to the 1970s and the early 1980s — a period when, admittedly, many of today’s Americans weren’t alive — surging inflation seemed unsolvable. From 1975 to 1980, the consumer price index (CPI) rose an average 9% a year. There was much ...
Read More »Barclays CEO’s next big challenge
Jes Staley, Barclays Plc’s chief executive officer, has a new spring in his step. After facing down an attack this year from an activist investor who wanted the British lender to shrink its investment bank, Staley has been vindicated. While a victory lap would be premature, Staley does have plenty to feel good about. His bank was able to preserve ...
Read More »Alphabet is a money making mystery but it really works
Investors are getting constant reminders that it’s not cheap for tech giants to stay on top. Alphabet Inc. reported that its third-quarter revenue increased 21.5% from a year earlier, excluding payments to Apple and other partners that carry Google’s ads or funnel web-search traffic to the company. This continued the company’s nearly uninterrupted trend of quarterly sales gains of 20% ...
Read More »Italy’s Salvini is back with a vengeance
Matteo Salvini is back with a vengeance. The leader of Italy’s right-wing League had disappeared from the political limelight after he tried and failed to force a new election in August, falling out of government. A triumph in a local election has shown that he’s primed for a return. Italy’s right-of-center coalition — made up of the League, the Brothers ...
Read More »India economic slump is structural, not cyclical
If the India story isn’t dead, it’s certainly on life support. The economy grew at 5% in the last quarter for which data is available, leading to a rash of downward recalibrations of growth for the full financial year. (India’s financial year begins on April 1.) Most recently, the Economist Intelligence Unit suggested that growth in 2019-20 will be 5.2% ...
Read More »Sun Belt cities in US are dangerous places to walk
The US Department of Transportation has published its most recent data on fatal motor vehicle crashes. In 2018, 36,560 people were killed in crashes, down 2.4% from 2017, which was in turn down 0.9% from 2016. According to the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatalities fell in every segment except for large trucks and “non-occupant fatalities†— pedestrians and ...
Read More »Get ready to ditch your business class flight
Stepping off the Eurostar train at London’s glorious St. Pancras station is always a thrill, but on a recent Sunday evening it felt downright radical. Unusually, I’d started my journey more than 10 hours earlier and 600 miles (966 kilometers) away in Berlin. I was attending a summit on decarbonising the economy organized by BloombergNEF and turning up by plane ...
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