Macron puts fishing before banking

The reaction from Paris to Theresa May’s crushing defeat on her Brexit vote has been telling. Where people in the UK have assumed until now that President Emmanuel Macron was more concerned about grabbing finance jobs from the City of London, his focus appears to have shifted since the emergence of the gilets jaunes protesters. This week, France’s preparations for ...

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Retailers are struggling to understand technology

Tens of thousands of retail and tech professionals descended on New York for the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, an annual industry confab where exhibitors show off new innovations and the crowd collectively scoffs at the idea of any kind of looming retail apocalypse. The great sport of the event is wandering the rows of booths and trying to separate ...

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Bank Indonesia should get a star for good behaviour

Bank Indonesia (BI) put in the hard work. Time for at least some reward. The work was a concerted, consistent and not-at-all hysterical approach to the slide in emerging markets in 2018. That meant six interest-rate increases to stem the rupiah’s losses. The message was transparent: Because the Federal Reserve was hiking every quarter, Indonesia needed to prevent a rout ...

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Britain better get used to being a small country

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a small country that is about to get even smaller. I know that this simple statement of fact will nevertheless infuriate many English people — and I do mean English people, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Last week, at India’s Raisina Dialogue, the Spanish foreign minister said that there ...

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A truly terrible idea for Deutsche Bank

If you’re looking for one of the worst ideas in contemporary banking, look no further than Germany. The mooted merger between Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG would make a mockery of any notion that EU governments are serious about ending the “too big to fail” problem. It would also turn back the clock on a guiding principle of European ...

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Economists need to add history to their tool kit

Back in 2011, as the US and other countries debated what to do about a recession that was stretching on much longer than expected, economists Brad DeLong and Larry Summers bemoaned what they considered a major gap in their fellow economists’ toolkit. Economists, they noted, learn a lot of mathematical models and empirical facts about the present, but not much ...

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ECB has narrow window for rate hikes: Economists

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will only have a narrow window to raise interest rates before the euro-area economy becomes too weak, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Mario Draghi is seen lifting the deposit rate at his final meeting as president in October, but his successor will only have until spring of 2020 to tighten policy before ...

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Real interest rates in South Asia among highest in the world

Bloomberg Real interest rates in South Asia are among the highest in the world, raising prospect of more dovish monetary policy in region. Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India rank in the top five of world’s major economies with the highest inflation-adjusted interest rates. While negative real rates might be considered a sign of financial instability, a high inflation-adjusted benchmark interest ...

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China quietly cuts borrowing costs

Bloomberg The People’s Bank of China has been quietly guiding interbank borrowing costs down without actually cutting official interest rates, with the latest move a record one-day injection of cash into the market. The central bank pumped a net 1.14 trillion yuan ($169 billion) into the financial system through open-market operations so far, with one say’s operation the biggest one-day ...

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Goldman sees India rate cut next month

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc expects India’s central bank to cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point in February, the latest to add its voice to a chorus of calls for monetary policy easing. The Wall Street bank said lower inflation projections, and expectations of a slower pace of US policy rate hikes prompted it to shift its call ...

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