Globalization of the world economy hits a wall

  For the first time since early 2014, the dollar value of goods imported and exported by the G-20 countries actually grew a little in the second quarter of this year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported last week. This is probably just because oil prices bounced back a bit after hitting a 12-year low in the first ...

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Smart immigration policy for a post-Brexit Britain

  A key demand of Brexit voters was to take back control of the U.K.’s immigration policy. Prime Minister Theresa May has promised she will —but hasn’t said what she’ll do with this control once she has it. Many Brexit supporters are hoping for a severely restrictive system. This would be a mistake, and May ought to say so. Liberal ...

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Free zones can enhance strength of SMEs

  An allocation of AED5 billion in contracts to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) announced by Dubai Expo 2020 manifests the importance that the UAE gives to the sector. The recent federal bankruptcy law is also aimed at boosting investment by SMEs to vitalize the country’s business landscape. Today, the segment is contributing 60% to the GDP of the UAE ...

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What Clinton could learn from Boris Yeltsin

  The failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to disclose that she has come down with pneumonia amplifies the parallels between this U.S. presidential election campaign and the 1996 contest that opposed the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. The two presidential races are similar in their negative framing. In Russia 20 years ago and in ...

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Bond markets hit a new ‘Ukrainian Chicken Moment’

  Two European companies — French drugmaker Sanofi and German household products maker Henkel — last week became the first firms to persuade investors to pay them to borrow euros. By selling bonds yielding minus 0.05 of a percentage point, they may well have signaled the bond market’s peak, delivering this decade’s equivalent of the “Ukrainian Chicken Farm Moment.” That ...

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Don’t assume robots will be our future co-workers

  Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is “Will the robots take our jobs?” This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call “skill-biased technological change” — people who are technically ...

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Bitcoin tech harnessed to push electricity revamp

  Bloomberg Bitcoin technology is starting to seep into the electricity business, shaking up the way payments are managed every time a light switch is flipped. From New York to Vienna, researchers and utilities are adapting the cloud-based ledger system used to track bitcoins as a replacement for slower administrative systems that require constant human input and multiple spreadsheets. Once ...

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HP Inc. to buy Samsung’s printer biz for $1.05 billion

  Bloomberg HP Inc. sees its future in copiers and printers. The personal-computer maker has agreed to buy Samsung Electronics Co.’s printer business for $1.05 billion, betting that it can grab share and generate income, even in a shrinking global market. The deal will add to earnings in the first full year, Palo Alto, California-based HP said in a statement ...

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Apple’s new iOS 10 rich in new features

  Relaxnews Apple release iOS 10, the latest version of its mobile operating system. The software update for users of the firm’s current compatible devices lands a few days ahead of the official release of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. This latest update is one of the richest in new features in the history of iOS. Notable additions include ...

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Fintech venture targets Hedge funds with big-data research

  Bloomberg A Japanese startup is entering the equity-research business in a bid to challenge the dominance of securities firms by using computers to crunch vast troves of information and predict companies’ earnings. Nowcast Inc., a financial-technology venture formed last year out of the University of Tokyo, will begin providing automated earnings estimates of consumer goods makers as soon as ...

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