Bloomberg The Democratic Republic of Congo will hold delayed presidential elections on December 23, 2018, the electoral commission said, a year later than opponents of President Joseph Kabila have demanded. National and provincial parliamentary polls will take place on the same date, Independent Electoral Commission Rapporteur Jean-Pierre Kalamba told reporters in the capital, Kinshasa. A series of other votes including ...
Read More »Let Mueller finish his job of exposing Russian meddling
Has there ever been a covert action that backfired as disastrously as Russia’s attempt to meddle in the 2016 US presidential campaign? Granted, we know all the reasons Moscow is gloating: Donald Trump is president; America is divided and confused; Russia’s propagandization of ‘fake news’ is now repeated by people around the world as evidence that nothing is believable and ...
Read More »The revolution of robots in banking is still a long way off
For more than a year now, a sort of phony war has been going on in the financial-services industry. Respected seers such as Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer John Cryan and Citigroup Inc.’s former chief Vikram Pandit have been prophesying a digital revolution that will see routine banking jobs replaced by automation, algorithms and artificial intelligence. To date, as ...
Read More »Broadcom Corporation’s American dream date
Well, that didn’t take long. Broadcom Ltd. is exploring a $100 billion-plus takeover of chipmaker Qualcomm Inc., Bloomberg News reported. This is the same Broadcom that announced its decision to move its legal headquarters to the US in an Oval Office presentation that carried the usual bravado of President Donald Trump’s administration. We wondered then if this sudden bout of ...
Read More »Powell’s Fed would be an unknown quantity
Donald Trump has a cautious side after all. In naming Jerome Powell as next chairman of the Federal Reserve, the president has chosen a loyal ally of the outgoing chair, Janet Yellen. At first sight, the appointment signals business as usual in monetary policy, rather than the unconventionality that some of the other candidates stood for. On the whole, this ...
Read More »Xi’s ‘new era’ risks greater tension between China, west
A ‘New Era’ in President Xi Jinping’s China risks setting off alarm bells in the US and Europe. The ruling Communist Party committed to the more assertive policy during a twice-a-decade reshuffle that ended last week, contrasting with a relatively restrained approach over the past three decades. Xi said that China was ‘approaching the center of the world stage’ as ...
Read More »Equifax can’t get out of its own way
It took Equifax just 35 days to determine that four of its executives did nothing wrong when they sold stock, saving themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars, just days after the company learned that it might have had a security breach. That was four days faster than it took the credit-reporting agency to tell the public about the hack. The ...
Read More »Apple earnings are a Rorschach test with an X factor
Here’s what we learned on Thursday about Apple Inc.: People weren’t that interested in buying iPhones in the three months ended in September, and the company isn’t likely to sell many more phones this holiday season than it did in 2016. Here’s what we still don’t know about Apple: Anything definitive about the company’s most pressing business questions: Will people ...
Read More »Stocks mixed as Donald Trump talks Asia trade; bonds rise
Bloomberg Stocks fluctuated and bonds advanced, while the euro and dollar slipped as President Donald Trump tried to tackle trade on his Asia tour. US stocks opened slightly lower. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index swung between gains and losses, even as a European purchasing managers index indicated strong momentum at the start of the fourth quarter. Basic resources shares outperformed ...
Read More »Nigeria’s naira problem sees no end
Bloomberg Nigerian officials are increasingly confident the naira’s troubles are over for good. Some investors disagree. Portfolio inflows have risen in the past three months with crude prices increasing above $60 a barrel and money managers taking heart from a new foreign-exchange trading window, in which the naira has converged with the black-market rate. That prompted central bank Governor Godwin ...
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