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Articles by The Corner

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The Corner
The Corner has a team of on-the-ground reporters in capital cities ranging from New York to Beijing. Their stories are edited by the teams at the Spanish magazine Consejeros (for members of companies’ boards of directors) and at the stock market news site Consenso Del Mercado (market consensus). They have worked in economics and communication for over 25 years.
US tariffs

World economy 1st April 2018

Phyrric US Tariffs: Protect a few at the cost of many

BoAML | President Trump enacted tariffs on imported steel and aluminum with the exception of imports from Canada and Mexico. Domestic metal producers should benefit while the rest of the economy could feel the negative repercussion of higher input prices. The bigger risk is a trade war. The current policy is unlikely to have a big impact. However, a bigger trade war would be a nudge toward stagflation, depressing real growth and boosting prices.
Facebook 's leak of users

World economy 30th March 2018

Facebook Fear Unlikely To Knock Tencent Off Its Throne

As the saying goes, data is the new oil. And this month Facebook has fallen victim to a BP-scale leak in which 50 million users’ data was harvested without consent. While technology companies in the West feel the pressure, Jason Pidcock, Jupiter’s head of strategy on Asian income, argues that the picture looks brighter in Asia, particularly for the darling of Asian software technology: Tencent.

France

In Europe 29th March 2018

Budget Balance In France And The ‘Funding Pot’

Robust economic growth in France in 2017, coming in at 2%, helps ease the restrictions on public finances. The other point worth noting is that the government must use surplus income, or what is known in France as the ‘funding pot’, to rebalance public finance rather than embark on fresh spending measures if it really wants to prove its commitment on public finances.

Telefonica ever closer to selling its Central American subsidiary

Ibex, Markets 26th March 2018

Barclays Does Not Settle On Target Price For Telefonica

In three months, Barclays has cut its price target for Telefónica on four occasions, from 9,8 euros/share in December to 9 euros/share last time round, on March 19. That’s almost 10% lower. How can a company’s value change so much in such a short space of time?

US China trade tensions

World economy 26th March 2018

The Logic and Politics of U.S.-China Trade Tensions

Yukon Huang via Caixin | Despite a litany of warnings from experts and some of his own advisors, U.S. President Donald Trump is determined to pursue a series of counterproductive, protectionist measures. Many observers realize that China is the ultimate target of such measures.

The concurrence of global political risks with a reduced capacity for markets to absorb them is concerning

World economy 25th March 2018

Is It Time To Worry About Geopolitical Headwinds: U.S., Iran, and North Korea

“Separating political noise from market signals in an era of Tweetstorms, unconventional leadership, and low public trust has possibly never been more challenging”, says Tina M. Fordham, chief global political analyst at Citi. Will geopolitical risks grow in their potential to impact markets following the withdrawal of Quantitative Easing (QE)?