ON NOVEMBER 30th, as oil tsars from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia met in Vienna, Venezuela’s former oil minister, Eulogio del Pino, once one of their number, was seized by armed guards at dawn in Caracas, and taken to jail. His arrest was not publicly acknowledged in Vienna. His replacement, […]
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A BOA constrictor swallowing capitalism. A cyclone dragging the economy into its vortex. If you look back at how people described Walmart a decade ago, it is eerily similar to how Amazon is viewed now. The supermarket chain has “a scale of economic power we haven’t encountered before”, warned “The Walmart Effect”, a best selling […]
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ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has already changed some activities, including parts of finance like fraud prevention, but not yet fund management and stock-picking. That seems odd: machine learning, a subset of AI that excels at finding patterns and making predictions using reams of data, looks like an ideal tool for the business. Yet well-established “quant” hedge […]
Read moreA federal judge in Argentina indicted and asked for the arrest of former President Cristina Fernandez for trying to cover up Iran’s possible role in the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994 that killed 85 people, state news agency Telam said on Thursday. As Fernandez is a senator, Congress would first have to […]
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Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund has invested in Asian property for the first time. Norges Bank Real Estate Management, which manages the sovereign fund, the world’s largest, said Thursday that it had signed an agreement to buy a 70 percent stake in five properties in Tokyo, Japan. The fund will pay 92.75 billion Japanese […]
Read moreBookmaker GVC Holdings has offered to buy Ladbrokes Coral for up to $5.2 billion to create a global online and high street betting giant able to take on rivals and cope with a tougher regulatory environment. GVC, which boasts 79 million registered accounts and operates in 21 languages through names such as sportingbet and partypoker, […]
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Chancellor Angel Merkel could lead a minority government if current coalition talks with the German Socialist party collapse, according to the country’s deputy finance minister. “If the Social Democrats aren’t willing to actually compromise with us on the necessary issues like the question of how we remain a strong economic power … Then there can’t […]
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European markets are expected to open slightly higher on Thursday morning, as investors turn their attention to the States, awaiting more developments concerning tax reform and geopolitics. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 is expected to open 12 points up at 7,359, while the German DAX is set to open 36 points higher at 13,033 and the […]
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An affiliate of al-Qaeda that has executed several attacks across Africa — and is considered the organization’s wealthiest branch — is still sitting on millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains that help fund its deadly activities across the region, according to a new report. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Sanctions […]
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MANY marijuana growers in northern California, America’s biggest source of the stuff, had expected this autumn’s harvest to be the largest ever. After all, recreational marijuana becomes legal in the state in January. Instead, wildfires in October—spreading so fast they killed 43 people—burned up half the marijuana growing in the area’s tri-county “Emerald Triangle” alone. […]
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