Bhinneka News Online: Friday Morning Briefing: 'Under siege', oil industry mulls raising returns and PR game

Friday 25 January 2019

Friday Morning Briefing: 'Under siege', oil industry mulls raising returns and PR game

Final Day: 2019 World Economic Forum

Executives from across the global oil industry held a series of closed-door meetings and invited banking bosses and fund managers to discuss two key topics - climate change and pressure from investors. The meeting, held on the sidelines away from official Davos events, focused on generating high enough investor returns and fluffy enough PR to keep critics and regulators at bay. Follow the latest updates and insights from Davos.

“The party if definitely over.” That’s the verdict handed down from Eric Luo, president of China’s solar panel giant GCL System Integration Technology. The international solar power industry is about to lose a major competitive windfall as prices of Chinese-made solar panels begin to recover after a collapse last year.

IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton publicly questioned whether the Fed might feel constrained from lending a hand to other nations in the event of another global financial crisis.

Japan’s central bank chief, Haruhiko Kuroda told the World Economic Forum that fintech companies “may disrupt the banking sector in a serious way. How to deal with this situation, that is a very difficult question.” The complicating factor is simple: Drastic changes in financial technology are bringing a new set of issues for regulators to balance.

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U.S. senators took a second shot at ending a partial month-long government shutdown through a temporary funding bill, but President Trump demanded a “down payment” for a border wall that Democrats reject. After the Senate failed to advance two measures to reopen shuttered agencies, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle urged quick passage of a three-week, stopgap funding bill to create time for talks on border security.

The U.S. will start the process of sending migrants back to Mexico while their asylum requests are processed in U.S. immigration courts. Those being returned are non-Mexican migrants who crossed the U.S. southern border seeking asylum, arriving mostly from Central America. The government will return the first group to the Mexican border city of Tijuana, U.S. and Mexican officials said, marking the start of a major policy shift by the Trump administration.

The personal life and business dealings of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman have gone on public display since mid-November at a courthouse in New York, where Guzman faces 17 criminal counts and a possible life sentence. U.S. prosecutors have bolstered their case by calling to the stand law enforcement officers and Guzman’s former associates, including one who says she was his lover and another whose brother was among his top allies. Here are some of the most colorful tales from recent weeks in the courtroom.

A top U.S. official said Washington is seeking to ensure that Venezuelan oil revenue goes to opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaido, and to cut off money from increasingly isolated President Nicolas Maduro. U.S. support for Guaido prompted Maduro, Venezuela’s leader since 2013, to break relations with Washington and close all of Venezuela’s consulates in the United States.

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