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Derivatives shops, used to clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in trades every day, found themselves in a dramatically different era this week: the old days of manually processing deals.
(Bloomberg) — The European Central Bank lifted interest rates by a half-point and pledged another such move before officials then take stock of where borrowing costs must go to tame inflation. Policymakers, as expected, raised the deposit rate to 2.5%, the highest since 2008. They warned that the most aggressive bout of monetary tightening in … Read more
Will it get more accurate? Yes, but it’s hard to say by how much. The large language model underpinning ChatGPT is made up of 175 billion parameters, which are settings that are used to make the model’s predictions, versus the 1.5 billion that its predecessor GPT-2 had. It’s become accepted wisdom in AI that the more … Read more
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Let’s get one thing straight: Maximilian Büsser, the creative force behind the red-hot MB&F brand, isn’t making watches he thinks you’ll like. He already did that. For about seven years, the son of a Swiss diplomat and a mother from Mumbai was head of the watch division at luxury jeweler Harry Winston … Read more
Demand for smaller SUVs has been surging in India. They’re suited for the country’s driving conditions, which can vary vastly from smooth multi-lane freeways to rutted streets crowded with rickshaws, dogs and cows. They also offer aspirational buyers an important, yet affordable, status symbol, perching drivers above the masses. And while larger electric SUVs tend … Read more
(Bloomberg) — Economic growth in China slowed significantly in 2022 from a year earlier as Covid-19 and the government’s response led to the second-weakest performance since the 1970s. While economists expect activity to pick up steam this year, China is contending with near record-low consumer confidence, a property market in the doldrums and a shrinking … Read more
Germany “should now feel more responsible to support Ukraine,” Morawiecki told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The government in Warsaw wants to “inspire others” to send as many as 100 tanks so “we can make a difference in the battlefield in Ukraine.”
Members of the global elite are back in Davos in their regular January slot after a three-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
(Bloomberg) — Economists from Wall Street to the World Bank are increasingly convinced most parts of the world will be in a recession this year against a backdrop of sticky inflation and higher interest rates. Global gross domestic product will probably increase 1.7% this year, about half the pace forecast in June, according to the … Read more
Plentiful cheap labor, low energy and transportation costs and a generally peaceful era for geopolitics all helped turbocharge the globalization of supply chains and drive economic growth around the world in the decades after 1990. Whenever one of those pillars wobbled, there was cheap money to keep the party going, especially in the years after … Read more