(Bloomberg) -- The clamor for retail investors to get hold of precious-metals coins is about to get more urgent.The U.S. Mint said Wednesday it’s temporally halting production at its West Point facility in New York because of the risk to employees from the coronavirus. The site makes gold, silver, platinum and palladium coins which are sold through a network of distributors.The shutdown comes as convulsive swings in financial markets spur a surge in demand among retail investors for precious metals as haven assets. Last month, the Mint said it sold out of American Eagle silver coins, while the gold coins it offers were snapped up in March at the fastest pace in over three years.“The timing is awful,” said Everett Millman, a precious-metals specialist at Gainesville Coins in Florida. “It’s going to exacerbate the supply shortage” in the coin market when demand is soaring.Premiums for gold coins are at 5%-10% over...
(Bloomberg) -- Watching cricket and playing rummy are online passions for hundreds of millions of Indians, fueling a nascent gaming industry on the verge of quadrupling its revenue. That’s attracting attention from some of Asia’s biggest internet companies.Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and SoftBank Group Corp. are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Indian apps that use loopholes in anti-gambling laws -- some dating to India’s colonial era -- to offer bettors cash prizes, vacations to Macau and new iPhones.About 300 million players use apps such as Dream11, Play Games24x7, Paytm First Games and FanFight to gamble on “fantasy cricket” and rummy card games -- a player base expected to at least double by year’s end. Industry sales are forecast to reach about $3.3 billion by 2024, prompting India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to say the business eventually will surpass that of music, movies and TV shows combined...
The North American Council for Freight Efficiency reached out to a number of industry representatives, as well as some drivers who are facing the COVID-19 outbreak first-hand, to speak about how the pandemic is affecting trucking. ...
(Bloomberg) -- Gilead Sciences Inc. is considering acquiring a stake in Arcus Biosciences Inc., a cancer therapeutics company backed by Alphabet Inc., people familiar with the matter said.The companies have held discussions about Gilead taking a significant stake in the Hayward, California-based company, and also about possible development partnerships, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the details are private.Arcus shares jumped as much as 54% after the close of regular trading Wednesday. Earlier in the day, the shares fell 7.2% to $15.58 in New York during the regular trading session, giving the company a market value of $716.3 million.No deal is certain and the talks could still fall apart, the people said.Gilead has been expanding through acquisitions into one of the hottest areas of pharmaceutical research: cancer treatments that harness the immune system to fight tumors. It acquired Forty Seven, an experimental cancer treatment company, in a...
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When the S&P 500 Index surged on Tuesday to its highest in five weeks, bringing its rally since bottoming on March 23 to 27%, the sense was that the market was signaling that the worst from the coronavirus pandemic would soon be over. On Wednesday, though, the benchmark took a hit, falling by more than 2% as data on U.S. retail sales and factory output for March posted historic declines. Other figures measuring economic activity for April also suggested a very deep recession is in play.The recent rebound in equities had made stocks as expensive as they have been at any point during the past two decades based on one key measure: The S&P 500 was trading at about 20 times this year’s estimated earnings. Problem is, analysts have only started cutting their 2020 profit forecasts, dropping them to $141 a share on average for the index from $175 in early January,...
