Features

LONDON(Capital Markets in Africa) — Job vacancies in London’s finance industry slumped 54% in the third quarter compared to 2019 as uncertainty around coronavirus, Brexit and bank profits discouraged hiring. City firms were advertising 3,810 roles in the three months through September, according to data from recruitment firm Morgan McKinley published Monday. While this is a fraction of the opportunities available in previous years, the total has risen from 2,490 three months earlier, when the U.K. was…

LONDON(Capital Markets in Africa) — British officials are prepared to water down Boris Johnson’s controversial lawbreaking Brexit legislation in a move that could revive failing talks with the European Union, according to people familiar with the matter. The pound rose. Negotiations over the two sides’ future relationship have stalled, with the prime minister announcing on Friday that he will focus on preparations to leave the EU’s single market and customs union at the year-end without a trade…

NEW YORK(Capital Markets in Africa) — Fake reviews on Amazon.com Inc. during the pandemic have reached levels typically seen during the holiday shopping season. About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews assessed by the monitoring service Fakespot Inc. from March through September were unreliable, up from about 36% for the same period last year. The rise in fake reviews corresponded with the stampede online of millions of virus-avoiding shoppers. “We’ve only seen those kinds of numbers in…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in  Africa) — South Africa will be hard-pressed to realize its ambitions of attracting 1 trillion rand ($61 billion) of private investment in infrastructure if its past record is anything to go by. The investment drive began two years ago and is a key component of an economic blueprint unveiled by President Cyril Ramaphosa last week that aims to revive the coronavirus-battered economy. It envisions the government spending 100 billion rand on infrastructure, an…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail on Monday night, boasting at a rally in Florida that he felt “so powerful” after his recovery from Covid-19 that he wanted to walk into the audience and “kiss everyone.” “I am so energized by your prayers and humbled by your support,” Trump said at the outdoor rally at the Orlando Sanford International Airport, where there was little social distancing…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Economists like to think of themselves as mathematicians — or, if feeling momentarily humbler, as physicists. This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, however, seem to conceive of themselves more as engineers. Like Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who won the prize in 2012, Paul Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson are specialists in “market design,” a field which, as Roth wrote in a famous paper, calls for…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — In the runup to Guinea’s elections on Oct. 18, voters are grappling with a familiar-sounding problem: disinformation and a lack of transparency over who’s providing the news they’re getting. In the U.S., similar complaints led to a crackdown on campaigns such as those staged by Russia during the 2016 presidential vote, won by Donald Trump. This election cycle, Facebook has banned new political ads in the week before Election Day on…