Even trade war winners can lose. Ask Vietnam

In war, even the winners pay a price. Vietnam’s portrayal as a clear beneficiary of the US-China trade conflict was overdue for a reality check. President Donald Trump provided one, trash talking the country with the kind of language he once reserved for China and Mexico. Vietnam is “almost the single worst abuser of everybody,” he declared to Fox Business ...

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China corporate scandals scaring investors

China’s private enterprises under President Xi Jinping appear to be holding the short end of the stick. The government’s earnest deleveraging campaign has hit the sector disproportionately hard, and a never-ending trade war with the US has hurt manufacturing, the core of China’s entrepreneurial spirit. That’s only part of the story. Private businesses aren’t merely innocent lambs waiting on Beijing’s ...

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Broadcom’s play for Symantec goes too far

Technology companies that target fickle consumers can die in a flash. (Juicero, anyone?) The ones that sell technology to businesses tend to hang on a bit longer. That’s why old-guard technology companies that have lost relevance and stopped growing — think BMC Software, Compuware and Tibco Software — have been ripe takeover targets in recent years for the private equity ...

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Mario Draghi should replace Lagarde at IMF

Christine Lagarde’s nomination as president of the European Central Bank takes Mario Draghi a step closer to the end of his term. The Italian academic will step down in October after eight momentous years, during which he made the ECB the most important institution in the monetary union. That doesn’t mean, however, that he should retire from front-line policymaking. A ...

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Where India can find $1tn infrastructure funding

India will need $1 trillion of infrastructure investment to nudge annual GDP growth higher by just half a percentage point in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second five-year term. Of this, at least 55 percent will have to come from public resources. Where’s the money? Those figures from an analysis by the Confederation of Indian Industry are the No. 1 challenge ...

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KLM: An airline that does not want you to fly

Ever since the economist Milton Friedman claimed the sole responsibility of business was to maximise pro-fit, there’s been a lively debate about whether companies sh-ould have other, more socially beneficial aims. It’s pretty much accepted practice, though, for a firm to try to sell more of their products and services. To not do so is a good way to go ...

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Can anything delay the inevitable July Fed rate cut?

For weeks now, financial markets have been treating a July interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve as a sure thing. That’s a big deal because over the past quarter-century, the central bank has never failed to deliver when implied odds reach 100 percent. I’m certainly not one to fight the bond markets. But … there’s a first time for everything. ...

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Samsung fixes folding phone redesign after screen failures

Bloomberg Samsung Electronics Co has completed a two-month redesign of the Galaxy Fold to fix embarrassing screen failures that forced its delay, people familiar with the matter say, allowing the Korean giant to debut its marquee smartphone in time for the crucial holiday season. The world’s largest smartphone maker is now in the final stages of producing a commercial version ...

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Amazon to hire 2,000 in UK for latest tech ventures

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc is set to hire more than 2,000 workers in the UK, including engineers, software developers and data scientists, to develop its latest technology ventures. The Seattle-based tech giant’s UK workforce will total almost 30,000 people by the end of the year, and will include cloud and machine learning experts, corporate roles and fulfillment and delivery workers, the ...

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BMW and Daimler to offer self-driving cars from 2024

Bloomberg BMW AG and Daimler AG will offer cars capable of navigating on highways by themselves starting in 2024, as the luxury-car rivals cooperate to speed up the development of autonomous vehicles. They plan to sell cars equipped with so-called Level 4 self-driving technology, meaning the vehicles could manage motorway driving and parking without intervention from the driver, who will ...

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