The bright side of smart home silly season

  The Internet of Things is one of the gadget industry’s brightest hopes in a world that’s saturated with smartphones. Sensors are cheap, and digital giants such as Amazon and Google are aggressively pushing their voice-command technology. The resulting hype, however, spawns inventions that should only exist in the corny worlds of science fiction. At this point, the IoT market ...

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Does Dow Jones index at 20,000 matter?

  The Dow Jones Industrial Average came tantalizing close to 20,000 on January 6, a record level that is being closely watched (and hyped) by the financial media. At one point during the trading session, it was within 0.37 points, or 0.0002 percent. Most agree that it is just a matter of time before this milestone is attained. The longer-term ...

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A breadwinner, a homemaker and a laptop

  As millennials slowly age into family life, they’re faced with two daunting financial challenges: the rising cost of housing and the high cost of child care. One way to deal with these challenges is to use technology-enabled remote work so parents can live and work in cheaper small towns like their elders did generations ago. Annual growth in home ...

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Modi to open 16-storey bourse to rival Singapore, Hong Kong

  Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate an international exchange in Gujarat state’s new finance zone, seeking to grab some of India’s $48 billion in offshore banking activities from Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong. The India International Exchange, at the bottom of a 16-storey building that dominates the finance zone, will start trading single stock and equity ...

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China reserves slumped $320 billion in 2016 as yuan tumbled

  Bloomberg China’s foreign currency holdings fell for a sixth month in December, bringing last year’s drop to $320 billion as the yuan posted its steepest annual slide in more than two decades. Reserves decreased $41.1 billion to a fresh five-year low of $3.01 trillion, the People’s Bank of China said. That was in line with estimates in Bloomberg’s survey ...

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Ex-Barclays trader admits conspiracy to rig currency prices

  Bloomberg Jason Katz, a former Barclays Plc currency trader, admitted conspiring to fix prices in the foreign-exchange market, the third individual to be charged and the first to plead guilty in a long-running US criminal investigation into the rigging of currency rates. Katz appeared in Manhattan federal court, where he admitted to participating in a conspiracy with other bankers ...

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Goldman’s call is already being borne out by Lira’s plunge

  Bloomberg One of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s out-of-consensus calls for 2017 is already bearing fruit. While big investors are positioned for Turkey to do well, analysts led by Caesar Maasry recommended greater caution in a report — shortly before the lira plunged to a fresh lows against both the US dollar and the euro. The bank’s analysis of actively-managed ...

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Quest to make her run again

  Schwarzenbruck / DPA When Tanya Markova was just 12 years old, her life changed literally overnight when a rare disease of the spinal cord left her completely paralysed. “I woke up one day, wanted to get dressed and go to school,” says the Bulgarian-born student, who’s now 24. But suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her back and ...

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Pairing off their offspring at China’s marriage market

  Beijing / DPA Sunday is market day at the Temple of Heaven Park in central Beijing, with lots of haggling and touting of wares. “Woman, born 1988, 168 centimetres tall, 55 kilograms, nurse,” reads one notice among a row of other A4 sheets laid out on the paved ground. One man who looks to be in his mid-50s appears ...

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Trump’s trade deficit plan to hit Asian economy

  Bloomberg US President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to shrink a trade deficit with China through punishing tariffs wouldn’t just hurt the world’s second-biggest economy — it would also damage the rest of Asia too. That’s the increasing view of economists who say the risk of significant Trump-triggered trade tensions could slow growth in the world’s best performing region, which accounts ...

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