15 July 2019
Question: According to MSN: Money, what is the range of FICO scores and what is the U.S. national average?
Saudi women to gain travel freedoms in big victory for female rights – Pg. 1
- Saudi Arabia plans to grant women the right to travel without a male guardian’s permission as the government moves to relax social restrictions in the kingdom’s male-dominated society
- Women at any age and men under 21 currently need a guardian’s permission for international travel
- Female unemployment in Saudi Arabia stands at 32.5%
IMF chief backs stimulus eyed by top central banks – Pg. 3
- …thinly veiled nod to the US Federal Reserve and the ECB as they consider easing
- The IMF in April downgraded its forecast for global growth this year to 3.3% but predicted a rebound to 3.6% by 2020
- Mr Lipton, a former Clinton and Obama administration official who has been the first deputy managing director of the IMF since 2011, took the helm this month after Christine Lagarde was nominated to lead the ECB at the end of Mr Draghi’s term later this year
- The acting IMF chief said he was encouraged that the US and China had resumed their “dialogue” over trade,…
Tech woes put US on course for earnings recession – Pg. 6
- Equity investors are bracing for a second successive drop in US quarterly profits, led by technology and materials sectors, which could undermine a record run in the stock market
- Blue-chip companies across the US are expected to reveal a 2.8% drop in earnings per share for April to June,…
- Despite the first-quarter earnings contraction, US shares have continued to soar
- Labour costs amount to about 16% of revenues for the information technology companies, the second highest level after the industrials sector,…
- The impact of share buybacks will also soften the impact of lower earnings on a per share basis
Unsold property glut threatens India economy – Pg. 7
- Shadow banks grew to account for a fifth of new credit last year, and became the largest source of funding for real estate thanks to loan growth of more than 20% a year between 2013 and 2018
- …developers collectively owe $37bn to the non-bank financial sector
- …half of the luxury real estate in central Mumbai alone is unsold: 11,000 properties…
- In Mumbai, the glut of expensive housing has only increased. Unsold inventory in the city rose 14% in the first half of 2019…
Education start-up tipped to gain unicorn status – Pg. 8
- …aims to shake up executive education by delivering courses across the world in partnership with leading business schools
- …estimates that the online professional education market is worth $280bn globally, of which 15% is for high-level executive education
Insurance – Pg. 15
- …start-ups are betting that the global life insurance market, which ….generated $2.8tn of premiums last year, will eventually migrate online just as car and home insurance has done in places such as the UK
- The start-ups are betting that all that will change once today’s young adults, who have grown up buying everything online, reach an age when they start thinking about life insurance. That often coincides with buying a property or becoming a parent
- Without an agent to explain exactly what life insurance involves, the start-ups have had to do things a little differently, focusing on making their products as simple as possible
- Another hurdle for the start-ups to address is that insurance companies need people to go out and convince customers that they need cover
Answer: 350 – 850 and 704 is the US national average