Bloomberg Indonesian authorities are working to develop new investment instruments with “good†returns in a bid to retain onshore more than $10 billion that was repatriated under a tax amnesty program three years ago, with officials acting before a lock-in period on the funds expires later this year. Bank Indonesia, the Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Authority are ...
Read More »Singapore kickstarts zero-waste plan
Bloomberg Singapore is making a clarion call to citizens and businesses to reduce domestic and industrial waste towards zero as the country’s recycling rate has stalled and its sole landfill may run out of space by 2035. The government will publish a master plan in the second half, with grants to support projects, Masagos Zulkifli, minister for environment and water ...
Read More »Toyota’s new safety system keeps cars from crashing
Bloomberg Toyota Motor Corp — in an unusual move for the cut-throat car business — has decided to share with rivals an automated safety system that uses self-driving technology to keep cars from crashing. The system, known as Guardian, will take control of a car and steer it around an impending crash or accelerate out of the path of an ...
Read More »J&J’s $4.7 billion court loss may fade and go unpaid
Bloomberg A $4.7 billion jury verdict against Johnson & Johnson in July helped spark the company’s biggest annual share loss in a decade, spotlighting the potential cost of alleged health risks from its popular baby powder. But investors may have overreacted when a St. Louis jury sided with 22 women who claimed asbestos in the powder caused their ovarian cancer. ...
Read More »American economy floating on ocean of debt, warns Gundlach
Bloomberg Jeffrey Gundlach said yet again that the US economy is gorging on debt. Echoing many of the themes from his annual “Just Markets†webcast, Gundlach took part in a round-table of 10 of Wall Street’s smartest investors for Barron’s. He highlighted the dangers especially posed by US corporate bond market. Prolific sales of junk bonds and significant growth in ...
Read More »Ford’s cost purge hits Europe with thousands of job cuts
Bloomberg Ford Motor Co said it will cut thousands of jobs, weed out slow-selling variants and potentially close entire factories in Europe, as the carmakers’s global cost-cutting drive targets a region that has been a drag on earnings for years. The manufacturer, which employs some 54,000 workers across the region mainly in Germany, the UK and Spain, will also review ...
Read More »PG&E may give workers notices on bankruptcy
Bloomberg PG&E Corp, the California utility giant facing billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities, may notify employees as soon as Monday that it’s preparing a potential bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the situation. The San Francisco-based utility owner is planning to send the notice to fulfill a state law that requires the company to alert workers at least ...
Read More »Denmark tests extreme ‘mortgage pricing’
Bloomberg Danes may soon be able to get 30-year home loans at just 1.5 percent. That’s considerably less than many sovereign states pay to borrow for that period, including the US government. It’s not the first time Denmark’s mortgage-backed covered-bond market — the world’s biggest — has tested such extreme levels. It tends to occur when investors from Germany to ...
Read More »AfD is a Rorschach test for Germany’s politics
Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But because his party is Alternative for Germany (AfD), one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as he is socially. AfD is a Rorschach test for observers ...
Read More »Sainsbury becomes UK’s sick grocer
Britons tucked into J. Sainsbury Plc’s value-priced turkey crowns, costing 9 pounds, over the festive period. But its disappointing performance risks turning the group itself into the feast for Britain’s other big supermarkets. Sainsbury said like-for-like sales across the group fell 1.1 percent in 15 weeks to January 5, missing analysts’ expectations for a 0.3 percent decline. True, the reporting ...
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