Jim Hackett, Chief Executive of Ford Motor Co, said on Thursday that the company would be aiming to double its annual operating profit this year. Ford, the No.2 automaker in the U.S. had mediocre gains last year. Hackett’s comments on the coming year’s profits were made in an email to the employees at Ford.

Ford has been restructuring its operations worldwide, including plenty of cuts in Europe. The company also recently announced its new alliance with Germany’s Volkswagen to introduce self-driving and electric vehicles. This move will help both the companies save billions of dollars.

Ford’s fourth-quarter results announced on Wednesday, comprised of $7 billion operating profit in 2018 along with a profit margin of 4.4 percent, which is comparatively lower than the 6.1 percent reported in 2017. Ford has announced that it is targeting 8 percent operating margin in the upcoming quarter.

According to the email Hackett sent to the employees, 2018 was considered a mediocre year. He thinks the $7 billion which comes to 4.4 percent operating margin to be only half of the appropriate margin. He also mentioned that the company would be aiming for $14 billion although he has not given a timetable as to when the $14 billion targets will be hit. A Ford spokesman clarified that Ford was demonstrating to the employees how the margin target translates to the overall profit.

With 20 months experience on the job, Hackett said that it is time to bury 2018 in a deep grave and mourn over what could have been and focus better on the coming year.

Ford did not share a specific financial forecast for 2019 with Wall Street. It only mentioned that there is a potential for improving earnings and revenue. This is in stark contrast to General Motors Co, which is Ford’s larger U.S. rival. General Motors forecasted higher 2019 earnings on Jan 11, surpassing analysts’ estimates.

Hackett also said that he was angry at himself while looking through the 2018 results of the company. He speaks in his email about the competition which is better and how he believes that Ford is better than its 2018 results.

According to Hackett’s email, Ford is considering moving its timeframe to introduce electric and self-driving cars in its portfolio. He is trying to find out why it missed the trends in China, where Ford is losing money.  With China being the world’s largest auto market, this issue needs to be tackled quickly if Ford plans on doubling its revenue in the coming year.

Aimed at funding balance sheet expansion and accelerating growth of Iwoca’s product offerings and market share. The SME lender will use its award-winning technology to break the barriers obstructing access to finance for over 20 million European small businesses. While many firms are addressing the SME lending market, very few have a credit-product as advanced as Iwoca. Their industry-leading analytics and financial technology give them a competitive edge others will find hard to replicate.

The investment is preceded by another 7 million pounds invested in three European Financial Technology which are Tide, Previse, and DueDil as well as a 2.5 million in Unmortgage. The fintech venture capital firm Augmentum confirmed that these investments would allow exponential growth in the financial technology market worldwide. Augmentum is a unique fintech-focused venture capital firm in the UK, having launched on the main market of the London Stock Exchange in 2018. It gives various businesses access to patent funding and support, unrestricted by conventional funding timelines. The conglomerate of finance industry professionals specializes in investing in initial stage fast growing financial technology start-ups. They have globally selected a pool of disruptive start-ups that are innovating the banking, insurance, asset management, and wider financial sectors.

Iwoca is dedicated to providing fast, flexible source of business finance for all UK and European continental businesses. Their expertise range from retailers, restaurants, hotels to service providers that use Iwoca’s platform to fund various financial problems such as bridging short term cash flow gaps to investing in stock opportunities. From new start-ups to established businesses, Iwoca helps businesses from all walk of life secure funds and keep their ever going concern running. However, you must have a UK-based business and operate as a sole-trader, partnership or limited company to be eligible for membership. Start-ups on this lending platform have a limit of 10,000 pounds. Iwoca sheds visibility into the firm’s online accounts and bank statements, VAT returns and company accounts. Once approved, loans are transacted quickly without the usual complex paperwork which is synonymous with traditional business loans. The financial technology firm has funded more than 25,000 small and medium enterprises across UK, Germany, and Poland. This investment from Augmentum will give much-needed momentum to Iwoca and other financial technology start-ups that are looking for funding across the European continent.

The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be starting tax filing season on the next Monday. There is a high chance of the season to become chaotic as the IRS is hard-pressed on workforce by the on-going shutdown.

This could be the worst chapter of the current shutdown which has been dragging for 34 days. As per analysts, one in every ten taxpayers could face problems with their returns due to the IRS funding shortfall. Analysts also added that the situation might worsen if the shutdown drags for a more extended period.

The annual tax filing season for Americans to file their 2018 returns is starting from January 28 to April 15. And due to the partial shutdown, the IRS has designated more than 46,000 employees, or nearly 60 percent of its workforce, to work without pay on jobs such as staffing taxpayer help lines and processing tax returns and facilitating refunds.

Representative Richard Neal, Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, said, “People have figured out how explosive it could be, regarding not being able to pay down Christmas debt.”

Neal also added, “But when you call back 40,000 people arbitrarily, without any guarantee of remuneration, and ask them to pay for gas and things of that sort, their lives aren’t getting any easier because of it.”

Lawmakers on Neal’s committee hoped to learn more about the whole tax filing situation by a hearing with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin this week. But, the hearing has to be canceled as Mnuchin, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, declined to attend. Neal said he would be proposing more dates as per the convenience of Mnuchin.

“The fact that they’ve called people back is an indication of a chaotic situation,” Representative Bill Pascrell, a committee Democrat, said of the IRS. “It’s not just getting returns back to people in time, but getting the taxes reviewed in time. That’s very, very important.”

Representative Kevin Brady, the panel’s top Republican, said lawmakers should be aware of the impact of the shutdown on the IRS from the administration. Brady told reporters, “This is a bipartisan area of interest, to make sure this tax-filing season goes well.”

In the meantime, IRS has issued a statement stating it continues to prepare for the next week’s start of the tax filing season and it has started calling back its employees to be able to work efficiently.

As per analysts, the taxpayers filing electronically or with the help of professionals should not face any difficulties, but the lower-income filers are those who will be mainly impacted as they depend on the IRS for guidance to file tax.

There could also be problems as it will have to guide the taxpayers about the new tax policy landscape created by Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax overhaul.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center think tank said, “The longer you make people work without paying them, the more problems you’re going to have.”

The National Treasury Employees Union, a union that represents IRS employees and has sued in court to prevent the government from forcing them back to work without pay, said the number of workers working without pay is increasing and they are facing financial hardships to pay the mounting bills.

Representative Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican, said he expects the shutdown to end soon and he wants good coordination between the Congress and Trump to do that. Buchanan said, “If it doesn’t, we’re going to have to find a way to work with people financially because there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck.”

The shutdown has been affecting not only the lives of federal workers but also the American economy. The Trump administration and the Congress should soon reach a consensus so that the health of the economy is not damaged for a longer term.

After the global disruptions through trade wars and local issues like Brexit, the moods of the businessmen have indeed gone down. The on-going World Economic Forum is also not prone to that change. Many business elites from across the globe who have raised doubt over the performance of economy this year. The head of world’s largest hedge fund also has explained about the state of the economy in the forum.

“We are in this Goldilocks period right now. Inflation isn’t a problem. Growth is good, everything is pretty good with a big jolt of stimulation coming from changes in tax laws,” Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio said in Davos, Switzerland.

He also added in an interview with CNBC, “There is a lot of cash on the sidelines. … We’re going to be inundated with cash if you’re holding cash; you’re going to feel pretty stupid.”

But, he is not the only leader who had expressed confidence in the economy last year at the same forum. Tax cuts by President Trump and the Jobs Act had somewhat cooled the fears stemming from trade protectionism and tough immigration policy. The then CEO of Goldman Sachs also talked about animal spirits being out last year.

But, now the situation has changed a lot. The stock market has recently taken a plunge forcing the S&P to post worst year in the decade.

This year World Economic Forum has seen the mood and expectations of the business elites going to the opposite direction.

“Everybody’s skittish, you talk to enough people, and you express your skittishness, and it echoes, and it just keeps compounding,” Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, who’s led the bank since 2010, told CNBC on Thursday. “By the third day everybody’s a little depressed, and I spoke at a dinner we hosted last night with a bunch of CEOs and clients, and I said I don’t get it, I mean I don’t get it, we’re not living in a depressing economic world at the moment,” he added.

When asked about the potential trouble in the economy for this year, Bridgewater’s Dalio reversed his tone of last year and said he sees a significant risk for the year 2020 in the form of Recession.

“It’s going to be globally a slow up. It’s not just the United States; it’s Europe, and it’s China and Japan,” the billionaire investment titan said, “Where we are in the later [economic] cycle and the inability of central banks to ease as much, that’s the cauldron that will define 2019 and 2020.”

Contradictions-

Every year’s pessimism and the opposite state in the U.S. economy has become a trend in WEF. This is also criticized this year including Guggenheim’s global chief investment officer.

“Coming

[to Davos]

last year, there was such euphoria after the tax cut, the stock market was making new highs,” said Scott Minerd, global CIO for $265 billion at Guggenheim. “This year, everybody’s concerns about an economic slowdown, recession, the trade war. So I’m thinking to myself, time to go the other direction.”

“I got suspicious that this place is the land of contraindication,” he added.

As of now, the U.S. economy is not in a total bad shape. The numbers of Americans applying for the unemployment benefits decreased to a 49-year low last week, as per the Government data. Meanwhile, country’s GDP grew at 3.4 percent in the third quarter of 2018 and job creation has been on the brighter side for last year.

The current earning scenario also is telling a similar story. More than 70 percent of companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings have topped consensus profit expectations on the growth of about 11 percent, according to FactSet.

“I think we’ve got to put things in perspective. Davos people are in an environment of world leaders, and they’re talking on a high level, ” said Jack Kleinhenz, chief economist at the National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association. “When I talk to my retailers, they’re asking me ‘how do you see the consumer’ and ‘how might they be positioning themselves in 2019?’”

He continued, “The consumer is not overleveraged, balance sheets are in a good position and gas prices are lower, I think you have to make a lot of assumptions if you think we are on a path to recession.”

Not Rosy-

The situation all across the world is very uncertain.

World’s second largest economy has slowed down in growth. The country’s benchmark Shanghai Composite is down by more than 26 percent over the last year. China and the United States have engaged themselves in a bitter trade war over tariff and balance of trade.

The scenario in Europe is no better. The pan-European composite is also down by 10 percent in the last 12 months.

Bank of America economist Michelle Meyer said, “The global backdrop is more concerning now than it was last year. We’ve seen a steady weakening in China and the Euro area; I think that last year there was lots of optimism about what would come from the [federal] stimulus. It’s certainly helped support growth, and consumer spending got a nice bump, but that growth has really slowed since then.”

Yet, Meyer said recession prediction would be premature. She also added this year’s WEF would let us know more about leader’s feelings than expectations.

Amid trade tensions between the United States and China, China has blocked the access of Microsoft’s search engine Bing. And with the blocking of Bing, China blocked all major non-Chinese search engines that had been operating there.

And according to the reports from the sources, the order to block the search engine had come from the Government.

Microsoft Spokesperson in reply said they have confirmed that Bing is currently not accessible in China and they have engaged experts to determine the next step.

It should be reported here that the Internet is heavily censored in China as a form of information control. Many non-Chinese techs and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are blocked there.

The report of blockage of Microsoft’s Bing engine comes in the time of on-going negotiations for tariff between the two largest economies of the world. And experts believe that the trade war may have spillover effects on the technology world turning it into a tech war.

On Tuesday, the former deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhu Min said that China is also considering completely cutting investment into the Silicon Valley after the scrutiny episode with world’s largest telecom equipment maker, Huawei.

The issue with Huawei aggravated when its Chief Financial Officer was arrested in Canada last year. It is believed that the arrest was made on the request of Washington. The allegations on him were he violated American sanctions on Iran. Though he has been released on bail, the possibility of extradition is still substantial.

The United States along with many western countries including Canada, Germany, Britain, and Australia accuse China of data theft through its link with Huawei. They have even blocked Huawei’s equipment from sensitive infrastructure projects. However, Beijing denies these allegations.

In the past couple of years, China has declared openly its intention to become a world tech leader over the next decade, and it has been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in technologies like Artificial Intelligence and autonomous vehicles.

After the banking and financial technology firms, the blockchain technology has found a new client in the automobile industry. SEAT, a Spanish car maker, has joined hands with the Alastria consortium to develop products and services based on blockchain technology. The carmaker is looking to develop a system for exchanging its various product and services without the need of any third party, and hence, it has decided to embrace the concept of the blockchain. The company is of the view that the adoption of blockchain will help enhance procedural security of the system and make the transactions far safer for its clients.

SEAT and Alastria

SEAT is looking forward to testing and further developing its platform of blockchain-based products and services while seeking cooperation and synergies from the other participating companies in the consortium. So that you know, Alastria is a first blockchain infrastructure consortium promoted by the Spanish business institutions and companies belonging to a range of different business sectors. The primary objective of this consortium is the establishment and promotion of independent and neutral blockchain infrastructure that will work under the legal framework of Spain besides complying with regulations of the European Union. The consortium will help to make the funds and contacts available for the community members. It aims to develop a holistic blockchain ecosystem that will not only help the member companies but will also ensure that the benefits reach users and organizations outside the consortium.

Application Areas

The carmaker SEAT wants to make sure that different divisions in the company apprise themselves with the blockchain and the potential benefits they can derive from the technology. In the first phase of blockchain implementation, SEAT has chosen finance and production division for the blockchain implementation to improve the efficiency of procedural standards in the organization. The carmaker is looking forward to develop and implement digital solutions for improving the process of producing cars that will subsequently help it to become more flexible, agile, and efficient in the long run.

SEAT has already initiated the process of adopting and implementing blockchain technology. The company has recently collaborated with Telefonica, a Spanish telecommunication company, to implement the blockchain-based project to improve supply chain management at its Martorell factory. The project will help in traceability of the parts in the factory and will help SEAT to drive up the overall efficiency of its supply chain.