Bloomberg French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault is optimistic about the country’s new president, but he’s worried about the global economy. The chief executive officer of LVMH visited a technology fair in Paris where he mingled with startup founders and shook hands with 39-year-old President Emmanuel Macron, saying he is “very happy†with the new leader. Macron, who’s set to consolidate ...
Read More »France’s election marathon ends as Macron set for landslide win
Bloomberg The French voted on Sunday for the fourth time in two months and the main outstanding question is just how big a majority they will hand President Emmanuel Macron. Polls from Harris and OpinionWay last week projected that Macron’s Republic on the Move movement, known as REM, may take up to 80 percent of the seats in the 577-member ...
Read More »Catastrophic forest fire leaves 57 dead in northern Portugal
Bloomberg At least 57 people have been killed by a forest fire in northern Portugal, with many of the victims dying on the road as they tried to flee, authorities said. Thirty people were killed in their cars and 17 were found outside their vehicles by the side of the road near Pedrogao Grande, Secretary of State for Internal Administration ...
Read More »Trump not under probe for obstruction, lawyer tells NBC
Bloomberg Donald Trump isn’t under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, a member of the president’s legal team said, despite Trump’s own comments on social media this week that he’s the target of a “witch hunt.†“The president is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction,†attorney Jay Sekulow said on NBC’s “Meet the Press†on Sunday. The ...
Read More »Trump’s NAFTA delusion
The Trump administration is determined to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — which created a single market from Mexico’s southern border to the Yukon — but the main political appeal of this policy rests on a popular myth: that “fair†trade requires the United States to have a surplus or balanced trade with both Mexico and Canada. ...
Read More »India’s war of the mandarins leaves companies as victims
First they conveniently lost their voice; then they miraculously got it back. But now that the pundits of India’s economic establishment are talking again, all investors hear is discord. The biggest casualty of the war of words between the finance ministry in New Delhi and the central bank in Mumbai is India Inc. Without clarity on where policymakers want the ...
Read More »The Federal Reserve’s new normal
The Federal Reserve has prepared investors for a small increase in interest rates this week, part of its effort to get monetary policy back to normal. The central bank should deliver the quarter-point rise the markets expect — but that isn’t all it ought to do. Investors’ attention is turning to a new question: What does the Fed intend to ...
Read More »Media keeps missing political earthquakes
Last week, as the shocking results of the British elections arrived, the most over-used sentence in Britain seemed to be: “I was wrong.†Another insurgent mass movement following Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star Movement in Italy had caused a political earthquake. In one of the biggest political upsets in ...
Read More »Short-termism hasn’t hurt companies long term
Akio Morita, the legendary founder of Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp., once declared that “America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.†In an influential 1991 book called “The Japan That Can Say No,†Morita and his co-author, conservative politician Shintaro Ishihara, alleged that the short-term thinking of U.S. companies would be their downfall. Constrained by shareholders more obsessed ...
Read More »Cryptocurrency boom is getting a little absurd
There are now four times as many cryptocurrencies in circulation as fiat currencies. That’s amazing. And encouraging. According to the Swiss Association for Standardization, which maintains the International Standards Organization database, there are 177 national currencies currently in use. That list generously includes four precious-metals and four bond-market units (codes XBA to XBD, for the curious). The CoinMarketCap website lists ...
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