A messy withdrawal from the EU could cost the U.K. its current trade routes and threaten supplies of brie and parmesan, avocados and tomatoes…and even tea!
Source: BLOOMBERG NEWS
Founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1990, Bloomberg News is an international news agency based in New York. Coverage is focused but not limited to business and economic news.
Pigeonly is one of several applications that were designed by ex-cons and are transforming the way U.S. prisoners communicate with the outside world.
As the two superpowers get closer to an agreement, the global trade regime could suffer. History offers several precedents.
His record in Britain’s former colonies more closely resembles that of a war criminal than a defender of democracy and freedom.
The growing alarm after UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal suffered a defeat in Parliament isn’t just unsettling for British politics. Global businesses are on edge as well. Asian companies, whose operations and investments stretch far into Britain and the European continent, have a lot at stake as they face higher tariffs and costs. Tuesday’s setback will do little to cure the anxiety. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has sought to assure business leaders that their no-deal nightmare scenario could still be avoided, but with only 10 weeks left before the UK is due to leave the European […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK — As 2018 comes to a close, attention is turning to what is likely to happen in 2019. I have no idea. But if you follow these questions, you will have your finger on the pulse of the world to come: What will happen with Chinese civil society? Five to 10 years ago, China had a proliferating and diverse group of non-profit groups, think tanks and cooperative civil society institutions, such as charities and clubs. They never stood on a firm legal foundation, but in the last few years they have been subject to a severe crackdown, […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK — What a difference two decades make. In 1997, China’s gross domestic product was about 11% of the U.S’s. By 2017, it was up to 63%. But this overstates the difference in living standards between the two countries, since prices are generally lower in China. In purchasing-power-parity terms, China’s economy became the world’s largest in about 2013. So which country’s economy is really bigger? The truth probably lies somewhere between these two figures. If China were to abolish its capital controls and open its currency to foreign speculation, there’s a good chance the yuan would rise in […]
Monopolistic companies may be near a tipping point where people (and governments) want them reigned in.
Ethical concerns about last week’s CRISPR breakthrough in China are valid. But they can evolve quickly.
Alcohol consumption may be down in Russia, but profits are soaring for Sergei Studennikov, whose Krasnoe & Beloe (Red & White) supermarket chain specializes in beer and booze.
NEW YORK — The New York Times published an extraordinary column this afternoon by an anonymous contributor identified as a “senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” (In a tweet, and perhaps inadvertently, the Times also described its op-ed columnist as a man.) It’s readily apparent why the writer’s job would be threatened. His column describes a White House mired in subterfuge and scheming because President Donald Trump isn’t able or fit to carry out his duties. “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” […]
Spare a thought for the globe-trotting European stock salesman. Europe’s equities have seen 25 straight weeks of fund outflows, according to Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, wiping out all of 2017’s inflows. It’s the only region recording meaningful outflows this year — even emerging markets, performing far worse, can’t make that claim. So why can’t Europe get any love? The push factors are obvious: From Brexit to the Italian budget, Europe is still a continent that has a reputation for in-fighting for global investors. At the same time, the pull factors are lacking: Economic and earnings growth is decent but unimpressive […]
Tim Cook’s company has broken a stock market record, but a closer look at Apple’s operating numbers tells a more nuanced story.
Promising voters to get the EU to change is easy, delivering that change is next to impossible.
AUGSBURG — One moment you’re the globetrotting head of a corporation with an army of subordinates to execute your every order, the next you’re behind bars and required to file requests for items as banal as toilet paper. While jailing executives, particularly those of global companies, is an almost unheard of occurrence in Germany, that’s just what happened to Audi Chief Executive Officer Rupert Stadler last month. One of the few other corporate leaders to suffer a similar fate was Thomas Middelhoff, and he has some words of advice to adapt to the circumstances. “You need humility, otherwise you’ll crack,” […]
Internet giants have now started flirting with decentralization, to try and replace the so-far failed hopes of Bitcoin and blockchain technology.
Tim Cook’s company is a rock of common sense in an industry that’s gone rogue.
Kim Jong Un’s historic call for peace also included an unspoken message to U.S. President Donald Trump: North Korea won’t surrender its nuclear weapons easily. The agreement Kim reached Friday with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in declared “a new era of peace” and sought a formal end to the seven-decade-old Korean War. While it said both countries committed to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, it gave no details on concrete steps to achieve it. More ominously, North Korean’s state-run media released a commentary shortly after the agreement was announced calling on the U.S. to drop its “anachronistic hostile policy” and “bad […]
LONDON — The plot to reverse Brexit is missing a key ally: U.K. business. Companies have been among the most outspoken critics of the split from the European Union, and have much to lose from a divorce gone wrong. But as a group of lawmakers tries to engineer a second referendum, business leaders are recoiling. “Business likes certainty and I can’t see how discussion of a second referendum helps create that certainty when the negotiations are not even concluded,” says Miles Celic, chief executive officer of TheCityUK, the finance industry’s lobby group. Businesses are uninterested in politics. They want commercial […]
From Saudi Arabia to Iran, Moscow to Washington and beyond, the rising global tensions over the Syrian war could explode in unpredictable ways.
Beverage companies have responded to the planned tax by reducing the sugar content of their drinks.
There’s simply no way for Mark Zuckerberg to fix the fake news and data abuse problems without destroying his social network’s business model.
The city in the U.S. midwest has found a different way to make it in the modern economy.
-Essay- NEW YORK — I am of the view that incompetence, random error and sheer complexity explain most of the mistakes and strange events in our world, and that we shouldn’t readily jump to conspiracy theories. I’m pretty sure Neil Armstrong did walk on the moon, and still inclined to think (although not certain) that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, there is no Bigfoot and aliens have not recently visited humans on Earth. This exercise is not merely to pile up arguments for what you believe, but also to consider how and where you might be wrong. I recently raised […]
Categories
When Billionaires Turn To Nonprofits
NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are publicly traded, profit-oriented corporations. So it is interesting that when they announced their new joint health-care venture this week they made a point of saying it would be “an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” Interesting but maybe not all that surprising: Around the world, health, life and property insurance, as well as various other financial services, have long been provided by nonprofit organizations, mostly in the form of customer-owned mutuals. From the 1960s through 2000s, wave after wave of conversions turned […]
When the masses descend upon snow-covered Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, Esther Heldstab is determined to swim against the tide. The purveyor of tourist mementos on the town’s main street is one of the few shopkeepers who won’t hand over their keys to multinational conglomerates who transform shoe stores and bakeries into lounges and cocktail party space for the week. While the likes of Zurich Insurance, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank take over prime space on Promenade, Heldstab and her sister who run Swissalp Fantasy at no. 79 — where the window display features a stuffed Bernese […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — So Michael Wolff wrote a book about Donald Trump. Perhaps you’ve heard about it? The internet spent a few days pointing and laughing at the more extraordinary claims about Trump’s behavior (including some the book didn’t actually make), and then settled down to the serious business of figuring out which of them were true. The consensus here in Washington is that Wolff has perhaps been a little too credulous with his sources, particularly with Steve Bannon, who has since recanted. But beneath that is the feeling that while many of the specifics are in question, the underlying […]
Trump’s former strategist Steven Bannon was quoted as saying the families of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner may get caught in a significant federal money-laundering investigation.
The evidence so far is that corporations won’t be much affected and consumers could even benefit.
Is the American in good faith? Why now? What’s next? Questions pile up in the wake of a decision that reverses 70 years of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.
Now Vitali Shkliarov has headed home to oppose Vladimir Putin.
NEW YORK — Should central banks embrace cryptocurrencies, or even pioneer their own? In a nutshell, no. Crypto assets are an unusual innovation, still in flux and often poorly understood. Trying to centralize them in a bureaucracy is exactly the wrong way to go. Yet China’s central bank claims it is working toward a blockchain-based digital currency. Singapore has already experimented in this direction. The phrase “Fedcoin” is sometimes bandied about, though I’ve seen no concrete sign of the U.S. Federal Reserve jumping on this bandwagon. In its recent quarterly review, the Bank of International Settlements asked central banks to […]
Despite the growing list of powerful people toppled in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the biggest names in Washington are still dodging real scrutiny.
The Bitcoin rate spike, still alive despite bitter divisions in the community that supports the cryptocurrency, has laid bare the biggest problem with Bitcoin: Compared with fiat currencies, it’s painfully inconvenient and expensive to use as a means of payment. Bitcoin is set up to reward users for verifying transactions. Miners who package transactions into “blocks’ receive two kinds of rewards: The additional Bitcoin they produce by using their hardware to solve mathematical problems (an income stream that will eventually cease since 21 million bitcoins are the maximum that can be mined) and the transaction fees paid by users to […]
Japan’s trade surplus with the U.S. is mostly not about protectionism or aggressive Japanese policy — it’s about macroeconomics.
Think of Facebook as akin to a delivery truck, noting that such trucks often carry guns, junk food and bad books.
Any day now, Google is expected to achieve quantum supremacy—the use of a quantum computer to solve a problem that even the most advanced supercomputer can’t unravel. That milestone, which Google has said it will reach by year-end, will no doubt be greeted with headlines proclaiming the dawn of the quantum computing age. Prepare for lots of stories about how quantum computing will soon do everything from inventing wonderful new pharmaceuticals and almost-magical new materials (good) to rendering obsolete all existing public-key encryption (not so good). There’s plenty of momentum. Earlier this month, Intel Corp. researchers unveiled a superconducting chip […]
Nondisclosure agreements and other contracts perpetuate a culture of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace.
SAN FRANCISCO — I can’t help but feel disappointed that TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based startup and “sharing economy” pioneer, has agreed to become a unit of Ikea. Although the company has tried to cast the deal as an expansion opportunity, this outcome is a far cry from the lofty expectations of its early days. TaskRabbit’s fate illustrates Silicon Valley’s unbounded idealism when it comes to optimizing everything. The company was a catalyst for “collaborative consumption,” a movement in which everyone would share their homes, their vehicles and their time. In a seminal TED talk, Rachel Botsman declared that the currency […]
Facebook has agreed to give the government information on political ad campaigns. But the social media giant must behave more like other media companies in a functioning democracy.