The great Chinese environmental cleanup, now in full swing, is shifting the corporate landscape in unexpected ways and even stoking inflationary pressure that may soon be felt in supply chains worldwide. As President Xi Jinping’s government intensifies the fight against the country’s world-class pollution problem, companies are scrambling to adapt to tighter regulation while investing in cleaner energy. In industries ...
Read More »The Beautiful 50 fly close to the sun
China’s largest blue chips are flying high.There’s been a seismic shift in the notoriously speculative $8.7 trillion stock market. Large-cap blue-chip companies are the new darlings, a reversal from the smaller growth stocks previously in favor. The Beautiful 50, a local term for the 50 most influential companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, returned 33 percent this year. The Shenzhen ...
Read More »Google is filtering news for the wrong reason
We’ve known for a long time that Google makes content decisions, but recent moves in the direction of censorship are going too far. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a regulatory backlash given Google’s victims: websites that no mainstream politician will defend. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told a conference on Monday the company was working ...
Read More »Uber hack shows vulnerability of software code-sharing services
Bloomberg The data breach at Uber Technologies holds a lesson for software developers who use third-party services to store and share code: be careful what you share. Services like San Francisco-based Github Inc., GitLab and SourceForge are used by developers to collaborate on projects, track bugs in code and distribute early versions of applications. They’re a target for cyberthieves. Uber ...
Read More »Swiss bank UBS expands its workforce in ‘AI’
Bloomberg UBS Group AG is expanding its workforce in one of the few areas in banking where demand for talent is growing. “We’re currently recruiting more people for artificial intelligence [AI],†Veronica Lange, head of innovation at Switzerland’s biggest bank, said in an interview in Moscow. “These are data scientists, architects, business analysts.†AI refers to technology capable of performing ...
Read More »Chinese startup EHang develops flying car, to be rolled out in 2018
Bloomberg A Chinese startup has developed a flying car that it plans to roll out as soon as next year. EHang Inc.’s E-184 drone can carry one passenger in its small cockpit, but the firm says it’s working on a model that can carry two. EHang’s CEO Hu Huazhi says they’ll be in operation as “taxi drones†in Dubai in ...
Read More »Apple’s HomePod stays 3 years behind Amazon’s Echo
Bloomberg Apple Inc. audio engineers had been working on an early version of the HomePod speaker for about two years in 2014 when they were blindsided by the Echo, a smart speaker from Amazon.com Inc. with a voice-activated assistant named Alexa. The Apple engineers jokingly accused one another of leaking details of their project to Amazon, then bought Echos so ...
Read More »Barclays, Lloyds dividends in focus in toughest stress test
Bloomberg UK banks are bracing themselves for their grades in the toughest round of stress tests yet, with the fate of their dividends and strategies at stake as the Bank of England models how the seven largest British lenders will cope in another crisis. On Tuesday the central bank will reveal how they fared in a scenario that includes sharp ...
Read More »Banks squeeze Indian companies harder in $207bn bad loan fight
Bloomberg Roiled by India’s high-profile corporate defaults, the nation’s lenders are tightening the screws on borrowers with stricter debt covenants and greater enforcement as the battle to curb delinquent loans intensifies. Banks are asking for collateral that may amount to one-and-a-half times the value of the debt on new loans extended and are insisting on contracts that allow loans to ...
Read More »BOE’s Tenreyro rules nothing out on interest rates in Brexit era
Bloomberg Bank of England official Silvana Tenreyro said two more interest-rate increases will probably be needed to get inflation back to target, but Brexit will be the real determinant of where policy goes next. Less than a month after the first rate hike in a decade, Tenreyro’s comments reinforce the view of other Monetary Policy Committee members that the path ...
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