May 20, 2024

You are here: Home / 2017 / Archives for August 2017

Archives for August 2017

Why oil prices keep falling with US refineries knocked out by storm

August 30, 2017 by Leave a Comment

HURRICANE HARVEY LIVE UPDATES

An oil tank damaged by Hurricane Harvey near Seadrift, Texas, August 26, 2017 © Rick WilkingHurricane damage shuts down major US oil refineries

Hurricane Katrina caused significant damage to US refinery and production capacity in the Gulf of Mexico, and forced oil prices to briefly spike to above $70 per barrel in September 2005.

Contrary to analysts’ bullish forecasts before Harvey arrived, the price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude dropped nearly three percent on Monday and settled at $46.57 – the worst daily performance since July 7.

WTI continued to slide on Wednesday, down 34 cents to $46.10 per barrel. Brent crude traded 54 cents lower at $51.46 a barrel.

At the same time, US gasoline prices spiked to their highest level since the middle of 2015 after the storm knocked out nearly a quarter of US refineries. On Tuesday, US gasoline futures jumped four percent.

According to industry experts, the largest impact from the hurricane is currently on refined product supply, which is set to rise further.

“Crude oil prices are lower because of how much refining capacity (demand for crude oil) is offline due to the storm. Gasoline prices, on the other hand, are higher due to the refinery shut ins,” Jenna Delaney, a Senior Oil Analyst with PIRA Energy Group, a unit of SP Global Platts, told RT.

The analyst expects draws on gasoline and other refined products and inventories in the near term due to the dramatic reduction in refining capacity.

READ MORE Gulf of Mexico oil production down by a quarter after Hurricane Harvey

“As of Monday afternoon, between 2.5 million bpd and 3.5 million bpd of refining capacity in the Gulf Coast region was offline due to a combination of refineries being shut down or running at reduced rates. Although this is less than 20 percent of total refining capacity in the US, the Gulf Coast region is a major supplier of refined products both locally, and into other parts of the country,” Delaney said.

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/401416-oil-prices-harvey-refineries-platts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Howard Kaminsky, Publisher With a Best-Seller Sense, Dies at 77

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Laurence Kirshbaum, who worked at Warner in the 1970s and ′80s, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Kaminsky had been an entrepreneurial, risk-taking executive as the company grew quickly from a mass-market publisher of genre paperbacks to one that also competed heavily to sign major hardcovers. (Warner Books was part of the company that would become Time Warner.)

“Physically, Howard was a little guy,” said Mr. Kirshbaum, a longtime publishing executive who is now an agent. “And he loved being an iconoclast who didn’t care about corporate politics.”

He recalled Mr. Kaminsky dancing with the ebullient Mr. Simmons in the publisher’s office, “frolicking” with Norman Mailer in a pool at a sales conference and schmoozing with Nixon at a book party.

Mr. Kaminsky was lured to Random House in 1984 and named publisher and chief executive of its trade department — a significantly larger but more sedate realm than the one he was running at Warner. Random House had hardcover imprints like Alfred A. Knopf and Pantheon Books and published Ballantine paperbacks.

Howard Kaminsky at home in 1987. Dith Pran/The New York Times

“We have had many commercial best sellers, of course, but this adds another first-rate editorial mind,” Robert L. Bernstein, Random House’s chairman, president and chief executive, said at the time of Mr. Kaminsky’s hiring.

One of the books Random House published during Mr. Kaminsky’s tenure was “The Art of the Deal” (1987), Mr. Trump’s account (ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz) of his rise as a real estate developer. In pursuit of the company’s deal with Mr. Trump, according to The New Yorker, Mr. Kaminsky produced a mock-up cover with large gold block lettering, which pleased Mr. Trump but prompted him to make one suggestion: “Please make my name much bigger.”

Mr. Kaminsky came to be unhappy about having published Mr. Trump’s book, his daughter said. And when its sequel, “Surviving at the Top,” was published three years later, he told The Washington Post: “A lot of the yuppies that bought the first book were looking at Trump as, perish the thought, an icon. Now they probably don’t have jobs or can’t afford to buy the book.”

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Kaminsky’s time at Random House was not long. He was ousted after three years by Mr. Bernstein, who cited management differences. On the day of his dismissal, Mr. Kaminsky boasted that his department “will have the biggest year in its history.”

In “Newhouse” (1994), a biography of S.I. Newhouse Jr., whose family media company then owned Random House, the author, Thomas Maier, wrote that Mr. Kaminsky had approved large advances to authors without getting Mr. Bernstein’s approval.

“What was most galling to Bernstein, however,” Mr. Maier wrote, “was the persistent rumor that Kaminsky was Random House’s heir apparent, the man selected by Newhouse to lead Random House into the future. Bernstein began to believe that Kaminsky, who was not demure in speaking to the press, was the prime source of those rumors about him.”

Continue reading the main story

  • Manage Email Preferences
  • Privacy Policy
  • Opt out or contact us anytime

Mr. Kaminsky would later say that he and Mr. Bernstein had kept disagreeing on strategy. He told Business Week that the situation between them had become like a “compost heap: If it generates enough heat, it’ll catch fire.”

But he recovered quickly. Two months later he was hired by the Hearst Corporation’s trade book group, which included William Morrow and Avon Books. But by 1994 the unit had hit a downturn, and some of its top writers, like David Halberstam and Ken Follett, had left. Mr. Kaminsky resigned to take care of his wife, Susan Kaminsky, who had been found to have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Howard Kaminsky was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 24, 1940. His father, Arthur, was a furrier, and his mother, May (her maiden name was also Kaminsky), was a homemaker.

A novel by Howard and Susan Kaminsky. St. Martin’s Press

After graduating from Brooklyn College, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he impressed a fellow student, Stacy Keach, who was just beginning his acting career.

“He was in Aristophanes’s ‘The Birds,’ playing a servant who gets tangled up in his robe as he made his entrance down a ramp,” Mr. Keach said of Mr. Kaminsky in a telephone interview. “And it was brilliant comedically. He had all the physical skills of a Chaplin or a Keaton. So I went backstage to meet him and praise him. And he never acted again.”

Mr. Kaminsky began his career at Random House selling the rights to the company’s hardcovers to paperback publishers; briefly worked as a screenwriter; and returned to publishing at Paperback Library, as Warner Books was initially known.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

“Howard never asked me for favors vis-à-vis climbing up the ladder,” the comic actor, writer and filmmaker Mel Brooks, his older cousin, said in a statement. “He did it all by himself. Before I could turn around, he was the head of Random House.”

In 1979, Mr. Kaminsky began writing novels with his wife, the former Susan Stanwood, who died in 2008. They published two books under the pseudonym Brooks Stanwood (the given name was lifted from Mr. Brooks, who had changed his surname from Kaminsky), one under the pseudonym Arthur Reid and two others under their own names.

“Howard has a great story sense,” Ms. Kaminsky said as she and her husband were interviewed on PBS by Charlie Rose in 2003 while promoting “The Storyteller,” the book that used the Reid name. Explaining how they worked together, she said that Mr. Kaminsky had the idea, from which they develop a scenario, after which “we each write separate chapters, and they’re changed as they’re written.”

She added, “It’s our fifth book, so we’ve really learned to have the same voice.”

On his own, Mr. Kaminsky wrote “Angel Wings” (2013), a police procedural set in Providence, R.I.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren and his partner, Ewa Zadrzynska-Glowacka, whose former husband, the Polish playwright Janusz Glowacki, died this month.

The Kaminskys were paid about $800,000 for the hardcover, paperback and film rights to their first book, “The Glow” (1979), about a young couple in Manhattan who move into a building inhabited by a fiendish cult. Warner Books, which he was running at the time, did not bid for the book; publishing your own book there, he said, was taboo.

“If you did,” Mr. Kaminsky told The New York Times, “people would say things like `Howard is spending all his time on his own book.’ ”

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/books/howard-kaminsky-publisher-with-a-best-seller-sense-dies-at-77.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Trump Tax Plan May Free Up Corporate Dollars, but Then What?

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

That was what President George W. Bush set out to do in 2004 when he imposed what was meant to be a one-time reprieve and lowered the tax on those funds to 5.25 percent from a potential top rate of 35 percent. More than $300 billion flowed back into the United States, but despite safeguards, companies used most of the money to pay shareholder dividends or buy back stock, not to reinvest.

“Repatriation has little effect on real investment in the United States,” said Alan Viard, a tax expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

That’s because repatriation is not really about geography. Most of the money is not stashed in some underground vault overseas, but already in American financial institutions and capital markets. Repatriation is in effect a legal category that requires a company to book the money in the United States — and pay taxes on it — before it can be distributed to shareholders or invested domestically.

The whole notion of earnings trapped offshore is misleading, Steven M. Rosenthal, a tax lawyer and senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “The earnings are not ‘trapped,’” he said. “They’re not offshore. They’re not even earnings. They’re accounting gimmicks that allow earnings to be shifted abroad.”

What’s more, companies already get something akin to tax-free repatriation by borrowing against those funds, with the added bonus of being able to deduct the interest paid on those loans from their tax bill.

A shortage of cash does not seem to be what is holding back companies from expanding. Corporate profits are higher as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product now than they have been in decades, said Kimberly A. Clausing, an economist at Reed College who studies the taxation of multinationals. According to a study by Treasury Department economists, “excess” or above-average profits by a few global giants have increased.

“It’s not clear that giving them an even higher share of profits, or a windfall, is going to lead to extra investment,” she said.

President Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress have pushed to cut the corporate tax rate and to tax only profits earned in the United States. Bryan R. Smith/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A recent survey of business leaders by the international accounting and advisory firm Friedman, for example, found that just 23 percent would reinvest repatriated funds. Most would use the money to pay dividends or engage in share buybacks.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

To some economists, offering technology companies like Apple and Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer a discount on the corporate taxes they would normally owe simply rewards bad behavior.

“A lot of the funds got overseas in the first place via tax dodges, so giving firms a tax break on the money coming back seems like compounding the problem,” said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and a former economic adviser to the first President George Bush. Repatriation at a discount rate “is a tax break,” he said.

Continue reading the main story

  • Manage Email Preferences
  • Privacy Policy
  • Opt out or contact us anytime

If taxing foreign earnings that have already accumulated overseas is difficult, so is eliminating incentives that reward companies for continuing to keep profits in tax havens. To that end, Mr. Trump and the Republican leadership have pushed to slash the corporate tax rate and switch to what is known as a territorial system that would tax only profits earned in the United States and not those earned in other countries.

Mihir Desai, an economist at Harvard Business School, likes that approach. “We currently have the worst of all worlds,” he wrote in an email. “We have a high marginal rate,” which encourages companies to avoid taxes and puts the United States at a global disadvantage.

“And we have low average rates” — because of all the loopholes — “which indicate that we’re not collecting as much as we used to, given the very high level of corporate profits.”

The crucial questions are how to pay for a lower rate and how to prevent abuses. Corporate tax cuts that lead to huge deficits could hobble the economy. And a territorial system without sufficient safeguards could end up encouraging even more businesses to shift profits, operations and jobs to countries with lower tax rates.

Other nations with territorial systems have tried to prevent companies from wriggling out of paying taxes, while tax experts have suggested proposals ranging from a minimum global tax to tighter rules to prevent companies from relocating their patents and copyrights to tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

But skeptics worry that making the system airtight is impossible. “It’s an endless cat-and-mouse game,” said Matthew Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group based in Washington. “What’s driving companies to engage in paper transactions is not our 35 percent tax rate,” he said, but other countries’ willingness to undercut whatever rate the United States settles on. “You can never win if you are competing against their zero tax rate.”

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Gardner argued that a broader definition of American competitiveness is needed that includes not only the tax system, but also the business infrastructure that the tax system supports — bridges and roads, health care, education and research and development. “If all you think about is the tax rate, then it should be zero,” he said. “Competitiveness is about finding the right balance.”

The damage inflicted by Hurricane Harvey on Texas — which Mr. Trump has promised to help address with federal money — shows how quickly new budget demands can materialize.

Establishing rates that are sustainable over the long haul contributes to economic growth. “If Republicans cut tax rates to levels that are unsustainable, everyone will believe rates will go up,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of several books on globalization and economic inequality. “And that means you’re going to get even less investment, because they are looking at future tax rates.”

In general, though, Mr. Stiglitz argued that the link between tax cuts and economic growth is vastly overstated. “There is no evidence that cutting the tax rates stimulates more investment,” he said.

“Growth is low because labor force growth is slow,” and it is only going to grow slower because of immigration restrictions, he said. “And we’re not investing in education and research, which is why productivity is slow. The notion that changing taxes is going to lead to a growth spurt is pure nonsense.”

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/business/economy/trump-corporate-tax-plan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News

Sarah Palin’s Defamation Suit Against The New York Times Is Dismissed

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Palin said in the lawsuit that the editorial contradicted other articles in The Times that dismissed the idea that political rhetoric had incited the rampage. “The Times had ample facts available that established that there was no connection between Mrs. Palin and Loughner’s crime,” she said.

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The Times, leaving court in Manhattan earlier this month. He testified that he had not intended to blame Ms. Palin for the shooting in the editorial in question. Larry Neumeister/Associated Press

The Times filed a motion to dismiss the case in July.

Earlier this month, Judge Rakoff had ordered the author of the editorial to testify in an unusual evidentiary hearing, saying that a central question he would consider when weighing The Times’s motion was whether Ms. Palin’s defamation complaint contained “sufficient allegations of actual malice.”

The “actual malice” standard for defamation holds that public officials have to show that news outlets knowingly published false information or had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

Continue reading the main story

  • Manage Email Preferences
  • Privacy Policy
  • Opt out or contact us anytime

James Bennet, the editor of The Times editorial page, testified on Aug. 16 that he had not intended to blame Ms. Palin for the 2011 shooting. Instead, he said, he was trying to make a point about the heated political environment.

In his ruling, Judge Rakoff said that the behavior of Mr. Bennet, who introduced the statements in question during the editing process, was “much more plausibly consistent with making an unintended mistake and then correcting it than with acting with actual malice.”

“Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States,” Judge Rakoff wrote. “But if political journalism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited to those cases where the public figure has a plausible factual basis for complaining that the mistake was made maliciously.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for The Times said: “Judge Rakoff’s opinion is an important reminder of the country’s deep commitment to a free press and the important role that journalism plays in our democracy. We regret the errors we made in the editorial. But we were pleased to see that the court acknowledged the importance of the prompt correction we made once we learned of the mistakes.”

Lawyers for Ms. Palin did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/business/media/sarah-palin-lawsuit-new-york-times.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Britain Looks to Address Inequality With Executive Pay Measures

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

The difference is not as stark in Britain, but has nevertheless increased significantly in recent years. The average chief executive of a company listed on the FTSE 100, the country’s benchmark stock index, made 129 times as much as a regular employee last year, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. That was up from 45 times as much 20 years ago.

Prime Minister Theresa May wrote that some companies “have ignored the concerns of their shareholders” about executive pay. Pool photograph by Ben Stansall

But it has become an increasing point of contention here.

In one case, investors in the energy company BP protested against the $19.6 million compensation package awarded to the company’s chief executive, Robert W. Dudley, in 2016 — a majority voted against the deal in a nonbinding vote. And the salary of Martin Sorrell, the head of the advertising giant WPP, regularly attracts pushback from shareholders. Mr. Sorrell made 48 million pounds, or about $62 million, last year.

That expanding gulf has spurred the government’s proposals, which it plans to put into effect by June. In addition to forcing the publication of pay ratios, officials would set up a public register listing companies that faced opposition on pay packages from at least a fifth of shareholders.

Listed businesses would be pushed to improve employee representation on their boards, by assigning a nonexecutive director to represent workers, creating an employee advisory council or nominating a director from the work force. There is no punishment for failing to do so, but companies would have to announce why they had not followed the requirements.

“Today’s reforms will build on our strong reputation and ensure our largest companies are more transparent and accountable to their employees and shareholders,” Greg Clark, Britain’s business secretary, said in a news release.

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Theresa May wrote in The Mail that some firms had “ignored the concerns of their shareholders by awarding pay rises to bosses that far outstrip the company’s performance.”

The changes are not entirely unique. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015 required publicly traded corporations to begin providing standard information on pay disparities in 2018 (though the S.E.C. said in February that it might reconsider the measure). And in Germany, employees are often well represented on the supervisory boards of large companies.

The Highest-Paid C.E.O.s in 2016

Several executives in the top 10 are in the media or tech industries.

Still, unions and analysts criticized the measures, arguing that they lacked teeth.

The Trades Union Congress, an umbrella organization of labor unions, derided the plans as a “box-ticking exercise,” while the opposition Labour Party said that the efforts could be easily ignored.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Dirk Jenter, an associate professor of finance at the London School of Economics who has surveyed executive compensation, said he had doubts about whether the measures would make much difference and warned that some might even be counterproductive.

Continue reading the main story

  • Manage Email Preferences
  • Privacy Policy
  • Opt out or contact us anytime

In particular, companies that are in labor-intensive industries or that employ large numbers of people in lower-paid jobs, like supermarkets, would look worse than investment banks, where average worker pay is higher.

“We’re punishing the companies that employ a lot of people,” Mr. Jenter said. “It in essence says you have a choice between employing low-paid employees in your companies — janitors, cleaners, drivers — or outsourcing the services to other companies or machines.”

Greg Campbell, a partner in the employment department at the law firm Mishcon de Reya, said the efforts to increase worker representation were also relatively mild, because company directors in Britain are already required to consider employee interests.

“A diversity of views is always worth having,” he said, “but I don’t think it is enough to really shift the dial.”

Still, some are hopeful that the measures will raise awareness of worsening inequality.

“This is obviously a more voluntary nudge approach to improve corporate governance, but I think there is no magic bullet,” said Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. “Regulation can only take you so far because a lot of these issues are around organizational culture and leadership.”

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/business/britain-ceo-executive-pay.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News

‘Do It Now!’ U.K. Regulator Turns to Animatronic Arnold Schwarzenegger

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Lenders agreed to settle, and the product is no longer being sold, but the cost of compensating people has far exceeded estimates. Banks in Britain have repaid more than 27 billion pounds, or about $35 billion, and set aside at least another £10 billion for customer redress.

The improper selling of payment protection insurance is one of several scandals that have hit the banking industry in Britain since the financial crisis that began in 2008 and weighed on the bottom lines of some of the country’s largest banks, including Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

But this year, the F.C.A. adopted a deadline of Aug. 29, 2019, for the public to submit final claims for compensation and kicked off a two-year education campaign on Tuesday to spread the word.

“We want to encourage people to decide whether to find out if they had P.P.I. and whether to complain or not,” Andrew Bailey, the authority’s chief executive, said in a news release.

The Schwarzenegger ad is part of the campaign. In it, a robotic head of the actor and former California governor follows British shoppers around a supermarket, imploring them to file their P.P.I. claims.

The regulator reportedly set aside £42 million for the overall campaign, which is being financed by firms that sold the insurance.

The campaign is similar to one by the government two years ago to educate the public and small businesses about workplace pensions. Those ads featured a giant purple and blue creature named Workie.

Continue reading the main story

  • Manage Email Preferences
  • Privacy Policy
  • Opt out or contact us anytime

As many as 64 million payment protection insurance policies were sold, mostly from 1990 to 2010, netting banks about £44 billion in premiums. Some claim-management firms, however, say the product was sold to a far larger number of people.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

The insurance was marketed alongside all sorts of products, including business and personal loans, mortgages, credit cards and in-store financing.

British regulators determined that the complex pricing and detailed conditions on a buyer’s eligibility to make claims made P.P.I. inappropriate for some consumers.

The amount of compensation claims peaked in 2012, but the pace has not slowed as quickly as the industry had expected, particularly as regulators delayed placing a deadline for claims to be filed.

Claim-management companies, which receive a commission when a person is compensated, have aggressively sought out consumers through cold calls, text messages and ads on daytime television.

As a result, the unexpected number of claims has dragged on quarterly results for banks in Britain.

Lloyds Banking Group, one of the biggest providers of the loan insurance in Britain, took a charge of £700 million as part of its second-quarter results in July. Barclays took a similar £700 million provision in its second quarter.

In the first five months of this year, banks operating in Britain paid out nearly £1.2 billion in P.P.I. compensation claims, according to the F.C.A.

Not everyone is happy with the advertising campaign, however.

Mark Davies, a spokesman for We Fight Any Claim, a claim-management firm, said the regulator should be taking a more direct approach and make banks write to anyone who may potentially have a claim. We Fight Any Claim has gone to court to try to stop the regulator from imposing a deadline on P.P.I. claims.

The point, he said, “is not spend a large amount of money on a Hollywood star. The point about this should be reaching the people you won’t reach, not making noise on television at enormous expenses.”

“That accomplishes little,” Mr. Davies said, “except to burn up the budget that the F.C.A. has allocated.”

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/business/dealbook/uk-ad-ppi-arnold-schwarzenegger.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Meet Verimi – Germany’s answer to US tech heavyweights Google & Facebook

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

© Mike BlakeGoogle faces over €1bn fine from Brussels over abuse of market dominance

The data platform Verimi (a combination of the words “verify” and “me”) is due to start early next year.

“With this cross-industry initiative, we are bolstering the digital expertise in Europe. Verimi has the potential to combine the highest standards of data protection and security with user-friendliness,” said Lufthansa board member Harry Hohmeister.

Lufthansa, Deutsche Telekom, and IT company Bundesdruckerei have recently joined the initiative which has been set by Allianz, Axel Springer, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Postbank and Here.

The platform’s single sign-on “master key” is meant to simplify the process of logging onto websites and utilize internet processes more securely.

US data platforms have repeatedly been criticized in Europe for their dominance on the web. With the new platform, the German alliance aims to change the process of signing up for online profiles of users via their Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Verimi’s “master key” requires users to log onto the platform once using their name and a password. Logging onto a new application will no longer require personal data to be entered each time. Users won’t need several passwords for different websites.

According to the platform’s official website, it will be available to a broad range of users in the automotive, finance, IT, aviation, media, technology, telecommunications and insurance sectors.

It is also establishing the “framework for personalized advertising and content that is both data protection-compliant and matches users’ preferences.”

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/401312-germany-corporations-verimi-launch/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Markets plunge & gold soars as N.Korea fires missile over Japan

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

© Kevin LamarqueTrump says ‘all options are on the table for North Korea’ – White House statement

The pan-European STOXX index dropped 1.7 percent to its lowest in six months before rebounding. 

The British FTSE100, Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC40 indices are more than one percent in the red. Markets in Japan closed 0.45 percent down, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.35 percent. China’s Shanghai Composite was flat, and finished trading 0.08 percent up.

Wall Street opened in red with Dow Jones down nearly 100 points during early Tuesday trading. NASDAQ slid 0.41 percent, while the SP 500 was 0.34 percent lower.

North Korea fired a missile on Tuesday that flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific about 1,180 km off the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

The strengthening euro has also been the reason for a drop in European equities.

“After weeks of quiet, renewed geopolitical tensions and a soaring euro are combining to cause some impressive moves across markets this morning. We have seen triple-digit losses on the FTSE 100, while in Europe the surge in the euro past $1.20 has resulted in a brutal morning for European equities,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG.

Gold was up 0.84 percent, trading at $1,326.40 per troy ounce. The demand for physical gold has increased due to the growing dispute between North Korea and the United States.

“We’ve seen a 78 percent increase in financial professions investing in physical gold on the expectation the equity markets and the dollar will continue to slip while the gold price rallies. Physical gold investment from first-time purchasers has increased by 87 percent as they worry about market uncertainty in the face of such volatile world leaders,” said the Pure Gold Company, a London-based physical trader.

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/401291-markets-plunge-gold-soars/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Japan Wakes to a Text Message: Missile Approaching

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

A woman checking for notifications from Japan’s nationwide emergency alert system at Sapporo Station, in Hokkaido Prefecture, on Tuesday. The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press

TOKYO — In earthquake-prone Japan, the public has grown accustomed to seeing regular alerts on television and their cellphones advising them to seek cover or move inland in advance of a tsunami. But on Tuesday, residents received a rare warning: A missile was approaching from North Korea and was likely to fly over parts of Japan.

Citizens living beneath the missile’s flight path received a beeping alert on their cellphones at 6:02 a.m., just four minutes after the projectile was launched, rousing some from sleep.

An alert sent to residents of northern Japan at 6:02 a.m. saying a North Korean missile had been launched. Thomas White/Reuters

At the same time the phone alert was sent, the public broadcaster NHK cut into its early morning newscast with a black screen warning citizens that a missile was approaching and they should take cover.

People in Tokyo watching a television broadcast about the missile. Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press

In Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, sirens went off, telling citizens to seek shelter.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

At Tokyo Station, one of the world’s busiest train terminals, an announcement on platform loudspeakers advised commuters: “Right now a North Korean missile is flying over Japan. It’s very dangerous. Please seek cover inside a train or in a waiting room.”

The government estimates that the missile broke into three pieces and landed about 730 miles off the coast of Hokkaido around 6:12 a.m.

Yet, a minute later at 6:13 a.m., NHK broadcast: “In case the missile passes over Japan, it seems like it will take about 10 minutes. At the moment, no announcement has yet been made as to whether it will pass over Japan.”

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/world/asia/japan-north-korea-missile-warning.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business

Serbia limits sale of land to foreigners

August 29, 2017 by Leave a Comment

© Tim Wimborne TBWAustralia rejects large land sale to China

The law requires EU citizens to live in Serbia for at least ten years before purchasing land; with plot sizes limited to two hectares. They should farm land as a lessee for at least three years before buying it, and a seller must first offer it to the state. The rules prohibit the sale of land close to military facilities and in national parks.

Foreign companies can buy farmland through local subsidiaries.

“Without the restrictions, we would be the only country to open land sales before becoming a member’’ of the EU; Agriculture Minister Nedimovic was cited as saying by Bloomberg. He added it was in the “national interest’’ to keep agricultural land locally owned, citing measures by other countries that are already members or seeking to join.

The restrictions come just days before Serbia is to open the market under the 2008 Stabilization and Association Agreement signed with the EU. The deal was inked when Serbs thought they would join the bloc within several years. President Aleksandar Vucic is looking to prepare the country for EU entry by 2020.

Serbia is the only country that has started liberalizing the agricultural land market and permitting sales to foreigners before joining the European Union.

Other countries opened up land sales after they joined the EU, while many even had a transition period of a few years. For example, Croatia managed to get a seven year grace period and Poland 12 years.

EU officials have repeatedly claimed foreign investment should not be viewed with suspicion while it did not open the door for EU citizens to buy land without any limitations but could bring new technology and know-how, helping to improve the competitiveness of Serbia’s agriculture.

However, farmers were raising concerns and calling for restrictions. In 2014, residents of the Serbian village of Kula made a formal complaint against a UAE company, Al Rawafed Agriculture, which was trying to acquire land. Kula residents wanted the contract revoked, saying they would lose their livelihoods otherwise.

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/401280-serbia-land-sales-foreigners/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business
« Previous Page
Next Page »