UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, posted an unexpected rise in net profit on Friday despite CEO Sergio Ermotti giving a cautious outlook and highlighting that low volatility had hurt certain sectors of the bank. Here are some of the key metrics: Q2 net profit: 1.174 billion Swiss francs ($1.21 billion), up 14 percent on a year […]
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BNP Paribas delivers earnings beat with strong revenues from investment banking division
France’s largest bank BNP Paribas announced Friday that it delivered a top and bottom line beat in the second quarter, against consensus estimates, as its diversified banking model helped it to weather the recent trading activity downturn more successfully than many peers. Here are some of the key metrics: Q2 net income: 2.396 billion euros […]
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Trending up: Gucci captures millennial to help Kering unveil more eye-catching results
The revamp of classic high-end fashion brands including Gucci and Balenciaga has helped French parent Kering deliver a stellar set of results for the first half of the year, with scion Francois-Henri Pinault telling CNBC that the company’s success is not as fickle as fashion itself. “What we did is that we transformed this business […]
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LONDON’S skyline has altered a lot in the last 30 years. While it can’t match Manhattan or Chicago, there are quite a few trophy buildings that can be seen from this columnist’s office window (for the moment*). The British sense of humour means these offices often acquire their own nicknames, regardless of the developer’s intentions—the […]
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LAST year over 102,000 people died in nearly 50 armed conflicts across the world, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank. Much of this violence is caused by tensions between ethnic groups—two-thirds of civil wars have been fought along ethnic lines since 1946. Yet historians differ over whether cultural differences or economic pressures […]
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IN DIFFERENT circumstances the two people could be good friends. Each is rather shy and very smart. And each is passionate about bitcoin, a digital currency. One invented hashcash, which foreshadowed components of the crypto-currency; the other is the author of the first Chinese translation of the white paper in which Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive […]
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CAST your mind back to when Bill Clinton was president, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin were fresh-faced new leaders and tweeting was strictly for the birds. That was when technology stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 tech index, last traded at their current levels. The horrendous decline in share prices that followed the peak […]
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IN THE film “The Devil Wears Prada”, the character of Miranda Priestly, whose role is based on a feared Vogue editor, scolds her new assistant for not understanding fashion. Fashion, she tells her, is whatever a select group of designers and critics says it is. What she does not say, however, is that their judgments […]
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WINDSOR, a community of 6,200 people two hours outside Albany in New York state, offers many of the amenities commonly found in a small town, including a bakery, a car-repair outfit and several restaurants. There is just one thing missing: a bank. The town’s only financial institution, First Niagara Bank, shut its doors in October. […]
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Boeing venture teams up with private moon lander for 2019 Apollo 11 anniversary launch
A private moon lander has partnered up with Boeing‘s United Launch Alliance (ULA) for its maiden mission to the moon in 2019. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s robotic Peregrine lander will use ULA’s Atlas V rocket to make its first trip to the moon on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The lunar lander – […]
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