Friday Morning Briefing: Trump asks SEC to look at ending quarterly earnings reports

Highlights

Trump said he has asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to study the impact of allowing companies to file reports with the financial regulator every six months rather than quarterly.

November’s congressional elections represent the first nationwide response to Trump’s aggressive trade policies, particularly in the Farm Belt, which runs roughly from Indiana to Kansas and the Dakotas, which favored Trump heavily two years ago.

Stiff new U.S. sanctions against Russia would only have a limited impact on its oil industry because it has drastically reduced its reliance on Western funding and foreign partnerships and is lessening its dependence on imported technology.

World

Unrecognized and unwanted: Now in Bangladesh, armed with their lists of the dead and directing foreigners to fellow refugees with pictures and video of the atrocities on their mobile phones, the Rohingya are struggling against attempts to erase their history in Myanmar.

An engineering study commissioned by Italian highway operator Autostrade last year warned about the state of the concrete-encased cable stays that held up a bridge that collapsed this week in Genoa, two Italian newspapers reported.

Riyazul Islam says he had to produce family documents going back to 1951 to prove he was an Indian and not an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant. But a draft list of citizens released in July excluded him and his mother, among a total of about 4 million people left off.

Breakingviews: Resembling Turkey is a problem right now. The lira’s alarming slide has made investors wary of any emerging country that shares too many of the same economic and financial vulnerabilities. The most similar, such as South Africa and Argentina, are already hurting. But even those with a less striking resemblance are vulnerable as capital flows out of riskier markets, writes Swaha Pattanaik.

 

Two @Reuters journalists have been detained in Myanmar for 249 days. Follow updates on the case: https://reut.rs/2yPnwus

6:45 AM - AUG 17, 2018

Business

Exclusive: U.S. seed sellers push for limits on Monsanto, BASF weed killer

America’s two biggest independent seed sellers, Beck’s Hybrids and Stine Seed, told Reuters they are pushing U.S. environmental regulators to bar farmers from spraying dicamba weed killer during upcoming summers in a potential blow to Bayer AG’s Monsanto.

6 min read

Greece set to exit bailout, still faces daunting challenges

Greece exits the last of its three bailouts on Aug. 20 and hopes to be able to borrow again in international markets after a nearly nine-year debt crisis that shrank the economy by a quarter and forced it to implement painful austerity measures.

4 min read

Toyota to increase production capacity in China by 20 percent: source

Japan’s Toyota Motor will build additional capacity at its auto plant in China’s Guangzhou, a company source said, in addition to beefing up production at a factory in Tianjin city by 120,000 vehicles a year.

3 Min Read

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