Bloomberg Theresa May will stand down as Britain’s prime minister next month but she is not giving up. With three weeks left before she hands over to someone else, the premier is busier than ever trying to build an ambitious legacy. May flew to Japan for the Group of 20 summit, where she tried to persuade Vladimir Putin to stop ...
Read More »Vladimir Putin’s domestic comeback isn’t working
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of routine, and one might have been tempted to ignore his 17th annual call-in show with voters as another pointless set piece. This year, however, the context made it more important than most of the previous ones: Putin, who’s trying to return to pedestrian domestic concerns after a long foray into great-power politics, ...
Read More »The trade myth Boris Johnson needs
One might have thought that Brexit debate could not be made any more confusing. But the Conservative Party leadership race is doing just that. The obfuscation serves a political purpose. Early this year, Brexiters who are happy for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal latched on to an argument that Britain, once it leaves, can keep ...
Read More »Huawei’s ties to China’s military aren’t problem
At first blush, the optics of Huawei Technologies Co. staff working alongside China’s military aren’t great. Company employees teamed up with various organs of the Peoples’ Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors over the past decade, spanning artificial intelligence and radio communications, Bloomberg News reported, citing publicly available documents. Among the joint projects: extracting and classifying emotions in ...
Read More »Currency wars are easy to start and tough to win
To President Donald Trump, and any other Group of 20 chief thinking about waging a currency war: It’s basically impossible to win. That’s partly because they don’t really happen in practice. If they did, everybody would lose because everyone would play. The surest way to affect the relative value of an exchange rate is through nudging interest rates up or ...
Read More »Air conditioning is the world’s next big threat
The vast majority of Americans have air conditioning but in Germany almost nobody does. At least not yet. So when temperatures in Berlin rose to an uncomfortable 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) this week – a record for the month of June – I was uncommonly delighted to go to the Bloomberg office, where it’s artificially and blissfully cool. By letting ...
Read More »Hong Kong banks’ biggest threat could end up saving them
In a poor, underbanked country, there wouldn’t be anything unusual about imposing a $6.40–a-month penalty on depositors unable to keep at least $640 in their savings accounts. That’s just how financial exclusion works. But in rich Hong Kong, a city that gives banks more than $26 billion in annual earnings, it took a fintech revolution to make HSBC Holdings Plc ...
Read More »The unbanked don’t need Facebook’s money
Among Facebook Inc.’s justifications for introducing a new digital currency, Libra, the company has offered one pious rationale: to connect the 1.7 billion adults who lack bank accounts to the global financial system. That’s certainly one way for the “unbanked†to enjoy the convenience of digital money. Or they could just use a DeathAdder Elite. The DeathAdder is, of course, ...
Read More »Huawei reprieve is good and bad news for Asia tech stocks
Bloomberg Many are expecting a relief rally after the world’s largest economies declared a truce in their trade war. In Asia, the sector that just won the biggest reprieve is tech stocks. President Donald Trump’s decision to allow US corporations to resume sales to Huawei Technologies Co, China’s largest telecommunications-equipment maker, will boost semiconductor stocks as concerns surrounding demand for ...
Read More »BIS starts fintech hub as banks look into crypto
Bloomberg The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is setting up shop to help officials embrace financial technology, who may need to speed up developing their own digital currency. The BIS, which promotes cooperation among the world’s monetary officials, announced it was starting an innovation hub for financial technology. And in an interview with the Financial Times, BIS General Manager Agustin ...
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