Finanzas

WARFARE has been transformed by drones. Using pilotless aircraft armed with precision weapons America can kill its enemies—in, say, the Hindu Kush or Syria—with a click of a mouse. There is a similar shift in economic diplomacy, where Uncle Sam has perfected new weapons that exploit its power over the world’s financial plumbing and over the brainiest parts of the tech industry. In April these weapons were used in anger on big, important firms for the first time. The targets were Rusal, a Russian metals firm, and ZTE, a Chinese electronics company. The results have been devastating—and alarming.

In 1919 Woodrow Wilson called international sanctions a “silent, deadly remedy” and over the next 70 years America deployed them about 70 times, reckons Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute. America achieved its geopolitical objectives only a third of the time, he says. But there was little doubt that it could meet its narrower goal of inflicting pain by halting trade with other countries and by…Continue reading

IN THE mining world the bout has the drama of a heavyweight title fight. In one corner is Ivan Glasenberg, billionaire boss of Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities-trading firm. In the other is Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire accused by America of corruption related to his dealings with Joseph Kabila’s government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The prize is a battery mineral, cobalt, which Glencore produces in the DRC and whose value has almost tripled since the electric-vehicle revolution accelerated at the start of 2017. It will be a tough fight. In the DRC Glencore is currently facing the potential loss of one of its biggest mines and sharply higher mining levies, as well as a costly lawsuit. “It’s a shakedown of Glencore,” says an analyst in London.

The clash between Messrs Glasenberg and Gertler, two former business partners, dates back to December, when the American government slapped sanctions on Mr Gertler, accusing him of amassing hundreds of…Continue reading

IT WAS not the sort of do-it-yourself activity that Castorama, a French home-improvement chain, usually promoted. The search engine on the firm’s website started offering customers puerile responses to their inquiries. Its auto-complete text function suggested such intriguing products as a “bollock hammer” or “cock sander”. It also returned offensive anti-Semitic phrases. The firm blamed manipulation by unnamed actors and had to briefly scrap its search function.

That incident, two years ago, was a reminder that much online search occurs within websites. Internet giants such as Google excel at bringing users to sites but once there customers often rely on websites’ own search functions to find products or services. Some firms build their own engines; others use open-source software, such as Elasticsearch, to supply them. The results can sometimes be painfully slow and undiscerning.

As e-commerce grows, so does demand for search systems that are fast, accurate and…Continue reading

JOHN LEGERE, the lion-maned boss of T-Mobile, made his wireless firm the fastest-growing carrier in America by cutting prices and giving customers better deals than AT&T and Verizon, which he relentlessly mocked on Twitter as retrograde behemoths. His personal brand as an industry maverick may have helped too. On April 29th he put that image to the test, agreeing to a combination with Sprint, the next largest carrier after T-Mobile, and creating a behemoth under his leadership.

The deal, all in shares, values the combined entity at $146bn including debt. If approved by regulators, it would squeeze the number of providers in the wireless market in America from four to three. That is a big “if”—twice earlier this decade, antitrust authorities have either stepped in to prevent such an outcome or indicated that they would do so, for fear of higher prices for consumers.

Mr Legere presumably knows the challenge, so he appealed to the political priorities of President Donald Trump….Continue reading

Calcula que la economía crecerá el 2,9% pero sitúa el desfase de ingresos y gastos en el 2,6%, frente al 2,2% que dice el Ejecutivo

El grupo pretende recaudar 10.000 millones de dólares con la venta de sus títulos en el parqué de Hong Kong

Paul Pester, consejero delegado, asume toda la responsabilidad de los problemas con los clientes, que han generado 40.000 quejas

El banco central de Estados Unidos se abre así la puerta para un nuevo incremento en la reunión de junio

QUAYSIDE, a 12-acre (4.8-hectare) stretch of flood-prone land on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, is home to a vast, pothole-filled parking lot, low-slung buildings and huge soyabean silos—a crumbling vestige of the area’s bygone days as an industrial port. Many consider it an eyesore but for Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation” subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, it is an ideal location for the world’s “first neighbourhood built from the internet up”.

Sidewalk Labs is working in partnership with Waterfront Toronto, an agency representing the federal, provincial and municipal governments that is responsible for developing the area, on a $50m project to overhaul Quayside. It aims to make it a “platform” for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing. If things go well, its innovations could eventually be rolled out across an 800-acre expanse of the waterfront—an area…Continue reading

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