The overnight trading session was relatively quiet, with U.S. markets closed for the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday. In Asia, futures pointed to a lower start for Japanese markets while investors are likely to keep an eye on Chinese markets after equities took a tumble in the last session. On the data front, the European composite […]
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Officially, North Korea’s top exports are coal and textiles, but its business dealings go beyond those products, extending to arms sales and exported labor. The United Nations estimates that more than 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in foreign countries, mostly in China and Russia, but also in countries like Malaysia, Qatar, Ethiopia and Poland. […]
Read moreWendy Poth, my aunt, lost her sight when she was 7. She’s now completely blind, so she doesn’t see shadows, faces or even the darkness when she closes her eyes. Wendy, who’s now in her 60s, has lived an independent life as a therapist and trained social worker. These days, she’s a die-hard technology enthusiast […]
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WHAT does France’s corporate establishment make of the change in fortunes of Patrick Drahi, a telecoms billionaire who achieved brief greatness before crashing to earth? In August he was reported to be planning a $185bn bid for Charter Communications, America’s second-largest cable operator, which is part-owned by John Malone, a famous cable investor. This month […]
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ITALY seems an unlikely place to be enjoying a boom in new listings on the stockmarket. It is full of family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that mostly rely for their finance on banks; and Italy’s banks are notorious for the bad debts still lingering on their balance-sheets. But Borsa Italiana, Milan’s stock exchange, has […]
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FORGET the “resource curse”. Australia is blessed with the stuff. For more than a quarter of a century it has not had a recession, thanks largely to Chinese demand for its raw materials. It is only a few years since the end of one such China-led boom, in base metals such as iron ore. A […]
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“WE USED to be so dismissed,” says Jeremy Stoppelman, the boss of Yelp, an online-review site which has waged a six-year-long battle against Google over how the online giant ranks its search results. Now American regulators are taking concerns about Google more seriously. On November 13th, Josh Hawley, Missouri’s attorney-general, launched an investigation into the […]
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STEVE JOBS liked to describe computers as “bicycles for the mind”—tools that let humans do things faster and more efficiently than their bodies would allow. The internet-connected bikes flooding the streets of urban China could be called “computers for the road”. Networked, trackable and data-generating, they are ones and zeros in aluminium form. The cycles […]
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AT SHINTOMI nursing home in Tokyo, men and women sit in a circle following exercise instructions before singing along to a famous children’s song, “Yuyake Koyake” (“The Glowing Sunset”). They shout out and clap enthusiastically even though the activities are being led, not by a human fitness guru, but by Pepper, a big-eyed humanoid robot […]
Read moreCurrency, United States Finance
Don’t expect much profit from major equities in 2018, warns investment bank
Investors should be prepared for relatively muted returns on major equities in 2018, according to strategists at investment bank Societe Generale. Robust earnings, subdued inflation, synchronized global growth and central banks looking to tighten monetary policy have all underpinned equities in 2017. However, the next calendar year does not likely to follow the same pattern, […]
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