Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Aug 20, 2018

choi

(1) Peter Coy, The Turkish Contagion. Turkey was ripe for a currency crisis -- and all it took was a tweet. The question now: Will it spread?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... isis-will-it-spread

Note:
(a) This is Remarks -- the opening article. There is no need to read it.Just turn to the table, whose second column is "current-account balance" as share of GDP (see footnote): China 1.2, South Korea 5.5 and Taiwan 13.6 (the highest in the table).

As reference:
Current Account Balance (% of GDP). World Bank, undated
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/bn.cab.xoka.gd.zs
(For 2017: China 1.3, Japan 4.0. Germany 8.1, United States -2.4)
(b) The tweet in the subtitle is Trump's, on Aug 10, 2018 that doubled "steel and aluminum tariffs against Turkey * * * following a defiantly nationalist speech Friday [also Aug 10] by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which he vowed that his country wouldn't bow to 'economic warfare.' "  Bloomberg News, Aug 10, 2018.

(2) Connor Cislo and Nao Sano with Jason Clenfield, Kevin Buckland and Masatsugu Horie, Electric Cars Threaten Japan's Industrial Heartland.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... pan-s-no-1-industry

Quote:

"The issue for Japan's Aichi prefecture, where Toyota[headquartered at Toyota 豊田市 [name changedthe current name in 1959], Aichi and hundreds of suppliers including [Tetsuya] Kimura's 木村 哲也 Asahi Tekkō̂ Co 旭 鉄工 株式会社 [1941- ]. are located, is that electric vehicles use about a third fewer parts than today's average car. Here's a sample of what you won't find in an EV: spark plugs, pistons, camshafts, fuel pumps, injectors, and catalytic converters.

"It's a slow-moving threat. Electric vehicles, or EVs, last year accounted for just 1 percent of global car sales, and most analysts say phasing out gas guzzlers will take many, many years. It’s also true that Toyota’s success with the Prius hybrid has made it slower than other carmakers to go electric, so Aichi prefecture has been able to carry on with business as usual for longer.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Auto suppliers in Aichi are bracing for the eventual demise of the combustion engine
(b) Print and the online version are identical. There is no need to read the rest, though.
(c) Aichi Prefecture 愛知県 has the capital in Nagoya. City of Toyota is 40-km air distance est of Nagoya.


(3) Jeremy Kahn, Why Can't Europe Do Tech?  It's been long time since the region produced a consumer-tech giant. Now's its chance. (one of the feature stories)

The first two paragraphs:

"Jeez, Europe, what more do you need? Great universities. Fantastic transit systems. More than twice the population of the US. The finest cars, watches, wine, beer—OK, the Americans do better beer now, but still. So many glorious advantages. And yet Europe, as ever, continues its reign as the globe's consumer-tech underachiever.

"The heyday of Nokia Corp and Ericsson AB is a distant memory, and Europe doesn't have anything remotely comparable to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, or Facebook, or Alibaba or Tencent, companies with market values ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion and counting. With apologies to Stefon, Europe’s hottest tech business is Spotify ($34 billion); the only one into nine figures is SAP ($140 billion) [which is not consumer-tech, oriented toward businesses]), the German maker of the world's most boring business software.

My comment
(a) Print and the online version are identical.
(b) There is no need to read the rest.