CNN (March 9)
“Its motto is “More than a club” and Spain’s Barcelona produced more than a result Wednesday routing France’s Paris Saint-Germain 6-1 to qualify for the Champions League quarterfinals.” Many had given up on the team, but Barca became “the first team to overturn a first-leg 4-0 deficit in the history of the Champions League.”
Institutional Investor (March 7)
State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) is taking the lead to promote board diversity just as it took the lead to reduce board tenure. SSGA “is calling for companies to include more women on their boards, or be prepared for the $2.4 trillion asset manager to start voting down board director candidates at the proxy level in order to force the issue.” SSGA has put 3,500 companies on notice that they have “about a year to increase diversity on their own before SSGA starts influencing their selection of board directors at the proxy level.”
Tags: Asset manager, Board diversity, Candidates, Proxy, State Street, Tenure, Women
Fortune (March 7)
Donald Trump may have “sent stocks skyward.” What follows may be less welcome. “The Trump Bump will make it far, far tougher to make money in the stock market in the years ahead. It may even set some investors up for big, big losses.”
New York Times (March 6)
“President Trump had no evidence on Saturday morning when he smeared his predecessor, President Barack Obama…. Just contemplate the recklessness — the sheer indifference to truth and the moral authority of the American presidency — revealed here: one president baselessly charging criminality by another, all in a childish Twitter rampage.”
Tags: Childish, Evidence, Indifference, Moral authority, Obama, Rampage, Recklessness, Smear, Trump, Truth, Twitter, U.S.Baseless
Euromoney (March 3)
“At what point does a boom become a bubble? The question needs to be asked in Asian high yield, where year-to-date issuance volumes are fast approaching the figure for the whole of 2016 in China and have already long exceeded it in India and Indonesia – after just eight weeks of the year, one of which was a write-off for Chinese New Year.”
WARC (March 3)
“US brands face a mixed reaction in China, as consumers react to the presidency of Donald Trump and his threat to impose tariffs on imports from that country.” Following his first month in office, “41.2% of Chinese consumers had a more negative view of the US.” while just “8.1% viewed the US more positively.” It remains to be seen whether American brands will face the intensely negative blowback that caused Japanese auto sales to contract by more than a third following the negative press surrounding a 2012 territorial dispute with Japan.
Tags: Auto sales, Blowback, Brands, China, Consumers, Imports, Japan, Tariffs, Territorial dispute, Threat, Trump, U.S.
Bloomberg (March 3)
There is a “big problem with China’s bridge and tunnel addiction.” It looks unsustainable. “China spent more than $10.8 trillion on infrastructure from 2006 to 2015…. Outlays for roads, airports, ports, railways, and the like rose 17.4 percent last year, far outpacing the country’s 6.7 percent expansion in gross domestic product.” To maintain the pace, Beijing is promoting public-private partnerships (PPP), but these look “unstable.”
Tags: Addiction, Airports, Bridge, China, GDP, Infrastructure, Ports, PPP, Railways, Roads, Tunnel, Unstable
The Economist (March 2)
The planned $30 billion merger between Deutsche Börse (DB) and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) “had been billed as a bridge between Europe’s two main financial hubs.” In tatters, the merger now stands as “a symbol of their growing competition—and of the uncertainty into which Brexit has plunged the EU’s markets.”
Tags: Brexit EU, Competition, Deutsche Börse, Europe, Financial hubs, LSE, Markets, Merger, Tatters, Uncertainty
LA Times (March 2)
The U.S. is “sending guns, crime to Mexico.” The country “has some of the strictest gun laws in the world,” but these don’t thwart the cartels. “To stock their arsenals, Mexican criminal organizations exploit lax U.S. gun laws, relying in part on straw purchases.” Each year, on average, over 250,000 firearms cross the border into Mexico from the U.S.
The Week (March 1)
Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress “was reasonably competent, at least by Trump standards. He didn’t sound obviously deranged, and he managed to adopt a somewhat dignified affect.” But his address was light on substance. He “neither gave a convincing account of how he might achieve any of his signature goals, nor did anything but paper over any of the ideological chasms in his party. Trump represents a party and a nation still totally confused about how to manage its affairs.”
