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Whenever I or someone else suggests that we need higher defense spending, there is an incredulous response from critics: US military spending equals the outlays of the next eight countries combined; how can we possibly be spending too little when we spend so much more than any conceivable adversary? The answer is that, while technically accurate, this argument is so ...

Flying cars! So futuristic! A world in which they’re buzzing around the skies must be dazzling – like a Popular Mechanics feature come to life! Well, yeah. About that. It seems increasingly likely that aerospace companies and startups are rushing to embrace a world of vertical take-off robotaxis. Just don’t be surprised if it looks a lot more like “Blade ...

What’s not to like about Singapore’s office property market? Take a look at CapitaLand Commercial Trust’s 2018 results. Singapore’s biggest office landlord, owner of $7.4 billion of the city-state’s commercial buildings, finished the year with a record-high occupancy rate of 99.3 percent. To achieve this, the real-estate investment trust didn’t have to compromise on pricing, at least not too much. ...

The longest a human has held their breath is 24 minutes and 3.45 seconds, according to Guinness World Records. Even if every minute were three months, Venezuela’s oil industry won’t be back on its feet by the time you have to come up for air, no matter how the current political chaos plays out. I’m not going to try to ...

Greg Fuzesi, an economist at JPMorgan, estimated that the low level of the Rhine and other important German rivers shaved off 0.7 percentage points of economic growth in 2018. The phenomenon, caused by a year of extraordinarily warm and dry weather, was almost certainly related to human-driven climate change. The damage to the economy makes it even more urgent for ...

Remember when proximity to China was an unalloyed positive? That worked great when China was in an upswing or chugging along; it’s not so great now that China is cooling. Across Asia, the slowdown is forcing export-dependent economies to lean more on domestic motors and contemplate juicing growth through either monetary or fiscal easing. China’s gross domestic product numbers showed ...

To have one airline limping forward on the brink of bankruptcy may be regarded as a misfortune. To have two looks like carelessness. That’s the fundamental problem for India’s aviation industry, home to the critically ill Jet Airways India Ltd. and its state-owned rival Air India Ltd., which more or less died in 2012 but has been kept on life ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank’s (ECB) pessimism over its economic outlook might not last long even if the euro area fails to pick up speed — instead it’ll just revise the projections to reflect the heightened risks. Governing Council members Francois Villeroy de Galhau and Vitas Vasiliauskas said that policy makers expect to cut their 2019 growth prediction in March ...

Bloomberg The European economy doesn’t show any signs of falling into a recession, ECB Governing Council member Klaas Knot said. “The European economy is doing pretty well,” and even though capacity utilisation is high and unemployment low, this isn’t leading to inflation, the Dutch central bank president said in Dutch television show Buitenhof. “I do find talk about a crisis, ...

Bloomberg Chinese regulators have allowed S&P Global Ratings’ Beijing-based wholly owned unit to conduct credit rating business on the mainland, according to a statement from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). The credit assessor is now allowed to register for bond rating service in China’s interbank market. The PBOC didn’t mention Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings in its announcement ...