Bloomberg Iran said it was unlikely to reach a much-anticipated agreement with Europe in time to avert another Iranian retreat from the limping nuclear deal, but gave European powers two more months to try to keep the accord alive. While president Hassan Rouhani said his country would unveil on Thursday further plans to ramp up its atomic activities, the extension ...
Read More »US shelters for migrant kids fail to screen workers
Bloomberg Contractors who run US detention centres for migrant children employed people who hadn’t completed background checks or didn’t meet educational requirements, potentially putting kids “at risk,†the health department’s internal watchdog said. More than half of shelters supervised by the Department of Health and Human Services allowed new employees to begin work without completing an FBI background check, a ...
Read More »Johnson’s Brexit plan in tatters as election fight looms
Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson began moves to trigger a snap general election after suffering a humiliating defeat for his Brexit strategy that left his ruling party in tatters. A fresh poll to choose a new government would mark the climax of the political chaos that has engulfed Britain for the past three years since the country voted narrowly ...
Read More »Trade war will start to hit consumers closer to home
A 15% tariff that went into effect September 1 on about $112 billion of goods imported from China will start pushing up prices of clothing, shoes and other consumer goods arriving at US ports this week. That should start taking a serious toll on shopping in the US. While 82% of intermediate inputs are already affected by tariffs, just 29% ...
Read More »WeWork’s balance sheet looks ugly
How to make sense of the whopping $47 billion in lease liabilities that WeWork disclosed ahead of its planned IPO? That figure makes WeWork one of the world’s largest lessees, according to Bloomberg data, which is pretty astonishing considering the flexible office space provider was founded less than a decade ago, bleeds cash, and doesn’t plan to become profitable any ...
Read More »China’s auto stimulus won’t delight gridlocked cities
Is China’s 14-month car crash at an end? After more than a year of declining sales, the country’s auto industry has relief in sight. Beijing’s ruling State Council told city governments to loosen or cancel restrictions on new car sales designed to limit congestion, as part of a package of measures to get sputtering economic growth back on track. The ...
Read More »Germany’s obsession with fiscal prudence
You can have too much of a good thing — even, as Germany proves, financial self-discipline. With the economy on the verge of recession and growth in the wider euro area sputtering out, a strong fiscal stimulus is needed from Berlin. Under conditions like these, fear of public borrowing is the opposite of prudent. The government is running a budget ...
Read More »Bank mergers are no silver bullet for India
With every passing day, India’s economic indicators are turning a little bleaker. The situation is bad enough to warrant using the word “crisis,†arriving just as the government’s fiscal ammunition is spent. The announcement of 5% GDP growth in the June quarter showed the economy growing at its weakest pace in six years. On Sunday, the top six carmakers reported ...
Read More »Blackstone Tallgrass bid reminds us why pipelines are unloved
One could almost feel sorry for that decidedly unloved crowd known as pipeline operators. Except they keep finding ways to make it really hard. Tallgrass Energy has received a buyout offer from an investor group led by Blackstone Group. This follows a deal in March in which the group took a controlling stake in Tallgrass. Things haven’t gone well since ...
Read More »Jack Ma saves us from Elon Musk’s AI dystopia
Tech billionaires Jack Ma and Elon Musk can’t agree whether artificial intelligence (AI) is going to take over the world. Only one of them is what we might think of as a tech guy, and it’s that difference that means the other is likely to be right. Musk, a physicist by training, is a well-known AI radical who sees the ...
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