Lime crashes in court bid to disrupt scooter scene

Bloomberg Lime, the electric scooter company valued at a $1 billion, lost its bid for a court order temporarily halting San Francisco’s plan to let two smaller companies operate after the city denied Lime a permit. But to Lime, a court decision not to block the city from launching its pilot program wasn’t all bad. The judge wants to “get ...

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Italy emerges as creeping concern among finance chiefs in Bali

Bloomberg As if trade wars, rising interest rates and slowing global growth weren’t enough, the world’s finance chiefs are zeroing in on another source of concern: Italy. The populist government’s rule-busting budget plans and accusatory rhetoric against its European partners have repeatedly cropped up among ministers and central bankers at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the ...

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On global warming its mission impossible

If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations group charged with monitoring global warming. Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), ...

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Fear not, ETFs control the gold price

Gold isn’t like anything else on the market. Ancient, fundamental, eternal – it’s different from all those here-today, gone-tomorrow assets such as Snap Inc. shares and cryptocurrencies. Right? Wrong. The last week’s surge in the spot gold price – a 2.5 percent jump to $1,224 an ounce, its sharpest leap in more than two years – looks like confirmation of ...

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Trump’s EPA would tie its own hands on rules

Mercury is a noxious byproduct of burning coal. It contaminates fish and, in turn, people, leading to brain damage in infants and small children, as well as serious cardiovascular and central nervous system problems in adults. Restrictions on US power plants have substantially reduced their emissions of mercury since 2015. Apparently, the Trump administration has a problem with that. Specifically, ...

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China can’t grow like an emerging market forever

There’s no economic crisis in China. There is a slowdown. That can be a good thing. Yes, China is the second-largest economy and deeply enmeshed in the planet’s commercial map. That’s all the more reason it needs to keep becoming a more normal economy, with a more mature pace of growth. That will increasingly be driven by consumers and technology, ...

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Trump puts supply-side economics to its final test

Corporate tax cuts were basically the last hope for supply-side economics. This economic doctrine, which became popular in the 1980s, holds that taxes distort the economy a great deal, and that cutting taxes therefore produces big gains in growth. Those gains are assumed to eventually result in higher wages for workers, leading some to derisively label the idea as trickle-down ...

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The stock rout, and a warning from IPOs

The market for initial public offerings (IPO) had been giving off warning signals long before this week’s rout in global stocks. The two are connected — and the human investors had a lead over the robot traders. London saw two big IPO disappointments which happened to be divisive stocks with strong bear cases. Online lender Funding Circle Holdings Plc, down ...

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Fund carnage shows peril of ignoring liquidity

Indian retail investors won’t easily forgive their fund managers, nor will they quickly forget this wealth destruction. Out of 416 open-ended, onshore equity funds, 401 have lost money this year. Tech funds, the only ones to have performed decently, have been helped by Asia’s worst-performing currency of 2018. And that’s only because Indian software exporters earn revenues in a strong ...

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Market meltdowns happen with an alarming frequency

Bloomberg You could write it off as a fluke in February. When it happened again in March, people got concerned. Now stocks are tumbling a third time in 2018, and investors are starting to sense something has changed. A smattering of 3 percent plunges may not make a bear market, but it sure is a break from the past, which ...

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