Brexit

[admin]

At the heart of investors’ reluctance to embrace bank shares is the country’s deleveraging campaign. China is tightening conditions in money markets to rein in a record debt pile built up after the global financial crisis. Higher funding costs will squeeze bank profitability, Fitch Ratings said last week, and there are recurring concerns over lenders’ balance sheets.
Bloomberg Intelligence says China’s bad loan woes will linger -- read more here..

China's Bargain Bank Stocks Miss Out on Rally - Bloomberg

China will further ease the tax burden on businesses and individuals, as part of a broader push to boost consumption and support economic growth. The structure of value-added tax will be simplified, from four brackets to three, and the rate for products including natural gas and agricultural items will be cut to 11 percent from 13 percent starting July 1, officials at a State Council meeting led by Premier Li Keqiang decided Wednesday, according to a statement.

China Rolls Out Fresh Tax Cuts in Bid to Support Economic Growth - Bloomberg

China’s labor market remained tight in the first quarter as the economy roared back. Workers, however, are finding that pay hikes aren’t as generous as they used to be. A slew of official and private indicators from recruitment fairs and websites show employment solid as factories stopped cutting payrolls amid surging industrial output. But services firms and new industries are no longer aggressively hiring, and wage gains for high-skilled professionals as well as less-trained migrant workers are moderating.

Chinese Workers Might Not Be Too Happy With Their Pay Raises - Bloomberg

[admin]

Not everybody agrees that hard Brexit will be a disaster for the City..

The loss of passporting rights following Brexit is one of the biggest fears in the City of London, but it will not lead to an exodus of London firms moving to other major cities in the European Union. That is according to Sam Bowman, the executive director of one of the world's prominent think tanks, the Adam Smith Institute, who spoke at a local Conservative party conference in East Croydon that Business Insider attended on Saturday. Bowman said: "Frankfurt is too small and Paris is a regulatory nightmare for multinational companies, and tax is too high. London has enormous benefits and the UK regulatory system for finance is very good in relative terms [to other major EU cities]." "They are barking up the wrong tree if they think they're going to steal business."

Adam Smith Institute Sam Bowman: Brexit impact on financial passporting, London jobs - Business Insider

[ArtM72]

There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm linked to the Leave.EU campaign, used botnets or any other illegal activity – it seeks to use the web to manipulate public opinion through legal means. Legal though such methods are, the sinister nature of this manipulation requires robust regulation.

What Brexit should have taught us about voter manipulation | Paul Flynn | Opinion | The Guardian

If you want a relatively easy solution to this make the Tenth Commandment law and its violation a punishable offense.

I've often believed that if one violates what I call the tenth of the "Ten Commandments", and such a violation were recognised as a crime with significant penalties, this fundamental threat to democracy would be greatly diminished. That commandment is "thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor". I call it the tenth commandment because in election seasons it is always the first to fall off the list away from the other nine.

If knowingly promoting and/or forwarding falsehoods, or information that could reasonably been determined to be false, about political adversaries or their beliefs by whatever means were a punishable offense, campaign advertising and activities such as those promoted by Cambridge Analytica could no longer draw upon fake news for their power. As it stands, it is exceedingly difficult to win an election when the adversary is unconstrained by truth. In fact at least in the US the spreading of political misinformation about a candidate is even protected from liable laws because of the public forum in which the lies are disseminated.

Criminalizing the failure to observe the 10th Commandment would not likely have affected Donald Trump's rediculous "I will build a great wall along our southern border and Mexico will pay for it" but it certainly would have greatly diminished the expectation that Clinton was going to prison for the long list of imaginary offenses her adversaries have promoted continuously for decades across the broadcast and social media.

Bottom line, for democracy to succeed a well informed electorate must choose its leaders. Misinformed electorates can, will and clearly have through their votes unwittingly participated in democracy's erosion. That has to stop.

[admin]

Hey Art, yea this is a problem, even if the truth will come out at a certain point (in this case that Brexit will cause economic damage). But the combination of the Mercers and the Russians and the change in the media landscape where platforms revert to the lowest common denominator to maximize clicks in the ad driven business model, that's a tough one to beat, even if the truth is already out there, it's just drawn out by nonsense..

[admin]

International banks are getting serious about moving staff to Frankfurt after last year’s Brexit vote, according to property brokers in Germany’s financial capital. “Nothing concrete happened last year, but that all changed in the first quarter of this year,” said Carsten Ape, head of office leasing for Germany at CBRE Group Inc. “Banks are now looking in earnest at specific locations.” The uncertainty triggered by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has prompted banks to consider setting up new hubs in the EU to secure continued access to the bloc. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. are considering choosing Frankfurt as their EU base, people with knowledge of the situation said in January.

Banks Get Serious About Moving Jobs to Frankfurt as Brexit Looms - Bloomberg

[admin]

Deutsche Bank is considering moving as many as 4,000 jobs out of the UK as a result of Brexit - nearly half the firm's current workforce. The possibility raised by the firm's chief regulatory officer was the latest warning from a financial firm since the UK voted to leave the European Union. Currently, UK-based companies can conduct business throughout Europe, but could lose that right. However, Deutsche Bank has said it is committed to the City of London.

Deutsche: Brexit risk to up to 4,000 UK jobs - BBC News

[admin]

Downing Street has said it "does not recognise" an account published in a German newspaper of a dinner last week between Prime Minister Theresa May and EC President Jean-Claude Juncker. The pair reportedly clashed over Mrs May's desire to make Brexit "a success" and whether the issue of protecting the rights of expat UK and EU nationals could be agreed as early as June. According to an account in Frankfurter Allgemeine, Mr Juncker said: "I leave Downing Street 10 times more sceptical than I was before." After the dinner, held last Wednesday, the UK government called it a "constructive, useful working dinner". But the German newspaper report suggests Mr Juncker said there would be no trade deal between the UK and the rest of the EU if the UK failed to pay the "divorce" bill which it is expected to be asked for.

Brexit: No 10 'doesn't recognise' account of Juncker dinner - BBC News

[admin]

JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to move hundreds of London-based bankers to expanded offices in Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg as it prepares for the U.K. to lose easy access to the European Union’s single market after Brexit, the firm’s head of investment banking said. "We are going to use the three banks we already have in Europe as the anchors for our operations," Daniel Pinto said in an interview Tuesday in Riyadh, referring to the New York-based firm’s local entities. "We will have to move hundreds of people in the short term to be ready for day one, when negotiations finish, and then we will look at the longer-term numbers."

JPMorgan to Move Hundreds of Staff to Three EU Offices on Brexit - Bloomberg

[admin]

Big banks in the City could shift at least 9,000 roles out of the UK as a result of Brexit, according to a tally of job warnings since the EU referendum. Deutsche Bank is leading the threatened exodus, according to research by Reuters, while the two financial centres making the most gains from London’s loss are Frankfurt and Dublin. Last month Deutsche warned that up to 4,000 UK jobs – nearly half its UK workforce – could move to Frankfurt and other EU centres. US bank JP Morgan is preparing to move up to 1,000 bankers out of the City to Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg. Goldman Sachs, despite continuing to build a new headquarters in London, has said it would need more people in Madrid, Milan, Paris and other cities in the EU.

City banks could move at least 9,000 jobs from UK due to Brexit | Business | The Guardian

[admin]

The novelist Ian McEwan has suggested that the death of many elderly Brexit voters over the next two years would help swing a second referendum in favour of Britain staying in Europe. “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth,” McEwan told a conference of remain supporters in Westminster. “By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5 million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves,” he said.

'1.5m oldsters in their graves' could swing second EU vote, says Ian McEwan | Politics | The Guardian