Behind Tech’s Shine, Some Warnings Signs Appear

Date: 05-02-2019
Source: The New York Times

Chinese consumers have pulled back their spending, blowing a $9 billion hole in Apple’s recent quarterly revenue. China was again a culprit when Nvidia warned last month that its revenue would come in 20 percent below expectations, though the graphics chip maker also blamed slack demand from Bitcoin miners and cloud data centers.

Intel, the big chip maker, cited intensifying “trade and macro concerns” for financial results in January that did not meet expectations. And Samsung, another semiconductor powerhouse, said sales plunged 10 percent in the fourth quarter because of weakening demand for its memory chips from data centers and smartphones.

China, smartphones, Bitcoin and cloud computing have been among the major drivers of the long tech boom, which in turn has powered the global economy for the last decade. The ingredient common to all of these sectors is computer chips, which form the brains of devices and whose ubiquity means they provide early signals about changes in supply and demand.

How EU Leaders Can Prevent a No-Deal Brexit

Feb 5, 2019 Anatole Kaletsky, Project Syndicate

Anatole Kaletsky is Chief Economist and Co-Chairman of Gavekal Dragonomics. A former columnist at the Times of London, the International New York Times and the Financial Times, he is the author of Capitalism 4.0, The Birth of a New Economy, which anticipated many of the post-crisis transformations of the global economy. His 1985 book, Costs of Default, became an influential primer for Latin American and Asian governments negotiating debt defaults and restructurings with banks and the IMF.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s strategy of threatening a no-deal Brexit requires a hard deadline that forces her opponents to capitulate. Without that, “running down the clock” becomes “kicking the can down the road,” which more accurately reflects May’s paradoxical combination of robotic inflexibility and exasperating indecisiveness.

LONDON – Has British Prime Minister Theresa May outmaneuvered all her opponents? By defeating Parliament’s effort to rule out a disorderly “no-deal” rupture between the European Union and its second-largest trading partner, May has redoubled pressure on EU leaders to accept her demands by the Brexit deadline of March 29.