Bloomberg PT Bukalapak.com, an Indonesian e-commerce marketplace, is preparing to complete a new round of fundraising that includes $50 million from Mirae Asset-Naver Growth Fund, according to people familiar with the matter. The investment may be announced as soon as this week, said the people, asking not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public. They declined to comment ...
Read More »UK luxury carmakers brace for worst as Brexit looms
Bloomberg Aston Martin and Bentley Motors saw this crash coming — but it’s still going to sting. Speaking onstage at a conference in Detroit before and after the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the chief executive officers of two companies synonymous with UK carmaking had been bracing for disaster. Both have been making arrangements to do ...
Read More »Trump pushes limits on unpaid workers
Bloomberg The Trump administration has ordered thousands of furloughed federal employees back to work without pay to inspect planes, issue tax refunds, monitor food safety and facilitate the sale of offshore oil drilling rights. The efforts in recent days illustrate how President Donald Trump is trying to limit the impact of the partial government shutdown and shield favoured industries as ...
Read More »Volkswagen-Ford alliance leaves investors feeling jilted
Bloomberg The much-anticipated alliance announcement by Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co left investors feeling let down as it lacked a big-bucks plan to join forces on electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Wall Street was hoping for a blockbuster deal, such as the billions of dollars General Motors Co. landed for its self-driving unit from Honda and SoftBank Vision Fund ...
Read More »US home sales dip, price growth hits 6-year low
Bloomberg Home sales in the US slumped in December, while prices inched up slightly, marking the smallest annual increase since the end of the last housing crash in 2012, according to data from brokerage Redfin. The median home price rose to $289,800 in December, a gain of 1.2 percent, the slowest monthly pace since March 2012. Sales dropped by almost ...
Read More »Germany looks to homegrown support
Bloomberg The German economy will have to lean on homegrown support to put the brakes on a slowdown after its worst performance in five years. Record-low unemployment, stronger wage gains and fiscal stimulus will underpin domestic demand after Europe’s growth engine stuttered in the second half of 2018, even though it avoided a recession. With export prospects deteriorating, those buffers ...
Read More »What Sears and GE’s decline teaches us about capitalism
General Electric (GE) and Sears have fallen on hard times, and that tells us a lot about US capitalism. Both were once great enterprises — symbols of American ingenuity and imagination. The temptation will be to blame their troubles on mismanagement. The real lesson is starker. It is that no business, no matter how historically innovative or powerful, is guaranteed ...
Read More »China’s consumer waves are all spent
Consumerism in post-1978 China has ridden five waves: from finding a solution to food shortages; to owning the “new big three†(refrigerator, colour TV and washing machine); spending more on information; buying automobiles; and finally, real estate. All the swells are now spent, according to Renmin University economist Xiang Songzuo. Using stimulus to reverse the first annual decline in car ...
Read More »Virtuous investing is starting to pay off
For investors trying to take into account environmental, social and governance concerns, the best response seems to have been to adopt a version of St. Augustine’s prayer: “Oh Lord, make my strategy pure, but not too quickly.†For whenever the issue of socially responsible stock-picking arises, so too does the suspicion that doing good comes at a price. A study ...
Read More »May’s crushing loss is proof Brexit has failed
“Defeat†is too small a word for the rebuke Britain’s Parliament handed Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday. Her Brexit deal, laboriously negotiated over many months, was voted down on Tuesday by a massive 230 votes — a far bigger margin than expected, and the worst loss of any British government in modern times. Yet if this brutal rejection has caused ...
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